QI The Book of the Dead

by pieces of burning wire, and the door to the room was ripped off its hinges.
    Franklin had other, less perilous, insights. He was puzzled by the fact that mail boats leaving Falmouth in Cornwall took two weeks longer to reach New York than merchant ships leaving from London. To solve the mystery, he took the direct approach and invited his cousin Timothy, a Nantucket whaler captain, to supper. Learning about the fierce ocean current that the whalers and the merchants avoided, but that the mail boats regularly sailed into, Franklin commissioned a group of experienced sailors to map the current and gave it a name: the Gulf Stream. This was typical of Franklin: if he didn’t understand something, he studied it carefully and asked for his friends for their advice – an approach Epicurus would have applauded. He wasn’t always right – he called the Gulf Stream a river, which it isn’t – but his instincts were sound. In 1756 his scientific achievements received the highest possible accolade when he became one of the very few Americans to be elected to the Royal Society in London.
    When he wasn’t inventing things, making money or pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge, Franklin worked as a diplomat, first in London and then Paris, skilfully negotiating America’s case and ultimately getting the newly independent United States recognised by the world’s two superpowers, France and Great Britain. He is the only one of the Founding Fathers to have signed all three of the key documents: the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. His success as both diplomat and businessman was due to the fact that people enjoyed doingbusiness with him. He was charming, witty and a natural dealmaker, always alert to the possibilities of compromise. Crucially, he could laugh at himself, which is one of the reasons his unfinished autobiography is so likeable. Describing how, at the age of twenty, he started on ‘the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection’, he set about it with scientific rigour, drawing up a list of the thirteen virtues he wanted to acquire (with temperance at the top of the list), quickly deciding he can’t manage all at once and so deciding to take on one a week. The account of his struggles – particularly his failures (which, with a dry printer’s wit, he calls ‘errata’) – is both very funny and very inspiring: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with jokes.
    Here’s a good story from the book. Franklin had been asked to publish a ‘scurrilous and defamatory’ article in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, but he strongly disagreed with both the tone and the content:
    To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind .
     
    It was typical of the man: at once morally admirable, rigorously original and faintly absurd. And, in realising that he could survive perfectly well living on bread and water and sleeping on the floor, he was a true Epicurean.

    But there was to be no ‘hidden life’ for Franklin. In his seventies, as US ambassador to France, though he dressed like a simple backwoodsman in a fur hat and a plain brown suit, there was no escaping the fact he was one of the world’s most famous men. As he wrote to his daughter:
    My picture is everywhere, on the lids of snuff boxes, on rings, busts. The numbers sold are incredible. My portrait is a best seller, you have prints, and copies of prints and copies of copies spread everywhere. Your father’s face is now as well known as the man in the moon .
     
    He was also – despite being old, bald and fat – very popular with the ladies. Although, as a younger man, he did admit to at least one illegitimate child (his son William), he probably wasn’t as much of an old goat as some have painted him. He certainly liked women – and had an uncanny ability to write as though he were one (as his many female pseudonyms show) – though most of his amorous liaisons seem to