Benjamin Franklin, deceased at the age of 82. He was possessed of an incredible and diversified talent.
Because just as “mediocrity is unilateral, talent is always multifaceted.”
Because Franklin was a writer, a scientist, a diplomat, a journalist.
He also collaborated in nothing less than the drafting of the Declaration of Independence of the US, his homeland.
It occurs to me to limit here an aphorism, which Jules Verne created.
“How much could one man think! How much could a humanity… thinking!”.
Franklin already at the age of 10, for economic reasons of his very modest family, stopped attending school.
Of course he was from that early age, an indefatigable reader.
He learned at the age of 12 the trade of typographer. Everything interested him!
I read an average of 2 to 3 books per week, whether they were science or philosophy. His young mind was not at rest.
In his time, the eighteenth century, people hardly even wrote to each other, because of the cost and delay of correspondence.
It occurred to Franklin to create -and he succeeded- the first national postal service in America, which today seems so natural to us.
Currently, e-mail is gradually replacing it.
He also created the first Fire Insurance Company and the first public library in our continent.
He was also interested in electricity. His research gave him international fame in that field.
And he also had the time and ability to be fluent in 6 languages.
But we still need to add an invention that helped and still helps today to save human lives: the lightning rod.
His first observation or deduction was that the bodies finished in a point, more easily attract the electric current.
He also deduced that lightning, that enemy until then impossible to defeat -or to defend against- had the same nature as electricity. And that it accumulated where it found more electrical fluid and that inversely it tended to disappear where there was less.
He called these positive and negative electricity.
The first experience was made with a kite.
At its top, he placed an iron spike. And one day when a storm was coming, he went up the kite that had an electric switch connected. He emphasized the word electric.
With the first downloads and already remounted the kite, he opened the stopcock. In that same instant he shook Franklin into his body with a powerful shock.
The nature of the lightning was confirmed. And the lightning rod would already be a reality.
He placed the first of them, in a house in Philadelphia. In the upper part, he put an iron bar to attract not so much the lightning but to discharge from the atmosphere, the electricity with which the clouds are charged, in storms.
In the lower part, he placed a long conductive thread towards the ground and buried it 4 or 5 meters away.
When a big storm came, the lightning was attracted to that place but continued to land without causing any damage.
The invention was received with jubilation and brought Franklin honors and international prestige.
He was also an irreducible man in his ideas. Because he knew that “compromise in a principle, was compromise in all the principles”.
And he spent his long life of 82 years contributing to humanity, that is, sowing. But not for a particular interest but only and simply… for the sowing.
And this man who more than two centuries ago, when the world was still a labyrinth, demonstrated that the enlightened always know the way out, brought to my pen this aphorism that I mentioned at the beginning.
“Clear minds better understand dark times”.
Source: Ambito
