QI The Book of the Dead

women’, impressing the British by swimming in the Thames, and learning the art of typesetting, he returned to Philadelphia where he set up his own printing firm and founded a society of like-minded tradesmen called the Junto – loosely derived from the Spanish for ‘joined’ – whose innovative thinking was to revolutionise the city.
    Philadelphia was already an interesting place. Named after the Greek for ‘brotherly love’, unlike most of the Puritan enclaves (such as Boston) it embraced religious toleration. All theProtestant denominations were represented – Moravians, Lutherans, Quakers, Calvinists – and there was even a Jewish community. Franklin, though always a believer, was no sectarian. He approved of the idea that all faiths should be allowed to flourish side by side. In a letter justifying his views to his hardline Puritan parents he explained: ‘I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did.’
    As Franklin’s business prospered, he was able to do an astonishing amount. In 1737, at the age of thirty, he was appointed as the city’s postmaster and swiftly transformed the postal service. Along with his colleagues on the Junto, he helped finance America’s first public library, started the first civic fire brigade and fire insurance scheme, opened the first public hospital, improved the city’s street lightning, built pavements, set up a police force and founded the University of Pennsylvania. Some historians have argued that the close partnership between business, charities and civic institutions that is still such a feature of American cities today was Franklin’s invention.
    It was by no means the only thing he invented. As an eleven-year-old he devised a pair of wooden hand-flippers to help him swim faster. They didn’t work particularly well, but he never looked back. He is credited with inventing the lightning conductor; the odometer (or milometer); the domestic log-burning stove (known still as a Franklin stove today); an extension arm for removing books from high shelves; a twenty-four-hour clock; a phonetic alphabet that did without the letters c,j,q,w,x, and y; a rocking chair with a built-in fan; the eerie-sounding glass armonica (Mozart and Beethoven both composed pieces for it); bi-focallenses (he asked his optician to saw his existing lenses in two, grind the top halves more thinly and then set all four pieces back in the frame); and the notion of daylight-saving. He also produced the first flexible urinary catheter in America to help alleviate the agony of his brother John, who suffered from kidney stones. Nothing was beneath his curiosity: he once submitted a paper to the Royal Academy in Brussels recommending the search for a drug ‘that shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies as perfume’, believing this would do more for the common good than the works of Descartes, Aristotle and Newton put together.
    He also made important contributions to science – the most famous being his daringly hands-on demonstration that lightning was electrical. This occurred in 1752, when, by flying a silken kite in a storm and touching a key tied to the string, he showed that electricity from the sky could be conducted through his body. Fortunately, the tingling sensation he experienced came from the latent charge in the thunderclouds rather than from a lightning strike on the kite. The latter would have resulted in not so much a tingling sensation as a 200 million-volt instant barbecue – as the Swedish physicist Georg Richmann found out less than a year later. In a fatal echo of Franklin’s experiment, Richmann ran a metal wire from the roof of his house in St Petersburg. The wire ended with an iron bar hanging above a bowl of water, filled with iron filings and a magnetic needle. The plan was to cause an electrical spark between the bar and the filings. According to his assistant, what happened to Richmann was much more dramatic. As he watched, he saw ‘a Globe of blue and whitish Fire, about four inches Diameter, dart from the Bar against M. Richmann’s Forehead, who fell backwards without the least Outcry. This was succeeded by an Explosion like that of a small Cannon’.Richmann was killed instantly (though the lightning left only a small red mark on his forehead); the assistant had his clothes singed and torn