Benjamin franklin inventions biography of christopher

Highway cleanup crews carry stainless steel arms to pick up litter on the side of the highway, and people suffering from severe arthritis will use reaching devices to take the strain off their joints. In Franklin's day, colonists staved off the chilly Pennsylvania winters by stocking their roaring fireplaces with oak, hickory and maple logs carried in from the surrounding countryside.

Only a few decades after the city's founding, however, the forests around Philadelphia were growing thin, forcing Philadelphians to travel as much as miles to find fuel — not an easy task on a horse and buggy. Franklin resolved to combat the growing energy crisis by finding a more efficient way to heat colonial homes. Fireplaces are woefully inefficient: They consume fuel uncontrollably, and most of the heat shoots up the chimney.

Franklin solved these problems by enclosing the fire in a cast-iron box positioned in the center of the room. The stove radiated heat from all four sides, and users could control the rate at which wood burned by adjusting the stove's airflow. Safely enclosed, the stove also eliminated the risk of fires being ignited by stray sparks. Versions of Franklin's original design are now a staple of cabins and cottages around the world.

Franklin's love of energy conservation prompted him in to pen a satirical letter to the Journal of France. Poking fun at the French tendency to stay out late and sleep in the next day, Franklin suggested moving the clocks backward to take advantage of daylight hours. The letter was obviously a joke, but many people still credit Franklin with conceiving daylight saving time.

As he reached old age, Ben Franklin found himself becoming both near- and farsighted. Outdoors, he needed a set of long-distance lenses to see where he was going, but when he examined something close-up, he would need to swap out his outdoor glasses for a pair with different lenses. It quickly became a frustrating ritual, so Franklin simply cut the two glasses in half and joined them together in one frame.

With the new glasses, Franklin could see long distances by peering through the lens at the top of the glasses. To read, he would simply peer through the bottom of the lens. Amazingly, both farsighted and nearsighted glasses had been around for centuries before Franklin's birth, but nobody had thought to join them together. Aside from a few improvements, Franklin's original bifocal design has remained relatively unchanged until modern times.

In , however, a team of Arizona researchers announced they had designed eyeglasses with lenses that could switch from far-sighted to near-sighted with the push of a button [source: National Academy of Sciences ]. Lightning was a supernatural scourge to the wooden cities of the 18th century. Churches were particularly susceptible, since they were often the tallest structures around, and a single electrical storm was known to lay waste to buildings across entire regions.

In Franklin's lifetime, a bolt of lightning even killed 3, people in Italy after it struck a church basement packed with gunpowder. Aside from fervent praying, no one knew how to protect buildings from this "electrical fire. Franklin retired from the publishing business at 42 to work full-time on electrical experiments. After countless hours spent tinkering with static electricity, Franklin figured that if a metal rod could be fixed to the top of a building and wired to the ground with a cable, it could gently extract the "fire" from a cloud before it had a chance to do any damage.

Franklin sent news of his protective rod across the Atlantic, where it was first adopted in the churches and cathedrals of the French countryside. Franklin coined many of the words still used in modern electronics, including "battery," "charge," "positive" and "negative. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.

Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. In , Franklin acquired the first of several enslaved people to work in his new home and in the print shop. Later in life, he became more vociferous in his opposition to slavery. Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and wrote many tracts urging the abolition of slavery.

In he petitioned the U. Congress to end slavery and the trade. In , he was elected a Philadelphia alderman and a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly, a position to which he was re-elected annually until Two years later, he accepted a royal appointment as deputy postmaster general of North America. He represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies.

Franklin sailed to London to negotiate a long-standing dispute with the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, taking William and his two enslaved people but leaving behind Deborah and Sarah. He spent much of the next two decades in London, where he was drawn to the high society and intellectual salons of the cosmopolitan city. After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in , he toured the colonies to inspect its post offices.

Since Franklin purchased stamps for his printing business and nominated a friend as the Pennsylvania stamp distributor, some colonists thought Franklin implicitly supported the new tax, and rioters in Philadelphia even threatened his house. Franklin fanned the flames of revolution by sending the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson to America.

The letters called for the restriction of the rights of colonists, which caused a firestorm after their publication by Boston newspapers. In the wake of the scandal, Franklin was removed as deputy postmaster general, and he returned to North America in as a devotee of the patriot cause. In , Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress and appointed the first postmaster general for the colonies.

In , he was appointed commissioner to Canada and was one of five men to draft the Declaration of Independence. After voting for independence in , Franklin was elected commissioner to France, making him essentially the first U. At the age of 74, he even proposed marriage to a widow named Madame Helvetius, but she rejected him. Franklin was embraced in France as much, if not more, for his wit and intellectual standing in the scientific community as for his status as a political appointee from a fledgling country.

His reputation facilitated respect and entrees into closed communities, including the court of King Louis XVI. And it was his adept diplomacy that led to the Treaty of Paris in , which ended the Revolutionary War. After almost a decade in France, Franklin returned to the United States in Franklin was elected in to represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention , which drafted and ratified the new U.

The oldest delegate at the age of 81, Franklin initially supported proportional representation in Congress, but he fashioned the Great Compromise that resulted in proportional representation in the House of Representatives and equal representation by state in the Senate. Catheters at the time were simply rigid metal tubes—none too pleasant.

So Franklin devised a better solution: a flexible catheter made of hinged segments of tubes.

Benjamin franklin inventions biography of christopher

He had a silversmith make his design and he promptly mailed it off to his brother with instructions and best wishes. So wrote Franklin about the musical instrument he designed in Get the full story here. Benjamin Franklin was many things in his lifetime: a printer, a postmaster, an ambassador, an author, a scientist, and a Founding Father.

In , he conducted his famous kite experiment and demonstrated that lightning is electricity. Franklin also coined a number of electricity-related terms, including battery, charge and conductor. In addition to electricity, Franklin studied a number of other topics, including ocean currents, meteorology, causes of the common cold and refrigeration.

He developed the Franklin stove, which provided more heat while using less fuel than other stoves, and bifocal eyeglasses, which allow for distance and reading use. In the early s, Franklin invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica. In , at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York , Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress.

Although his Albany Plan was rejected, it helped lay the groundwork for the Articles of Confederation , which became the first constitution of the United States when ratified in In , Franklin traveled to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in Over several years, he worked to settle a tax dispute and other issues involving descendants of William Penn , the owners of the colony of Pennsylvania.

After a brief period back in the U. While he was abroad, the British government began, in the mids, to impose a series of regulatory measures to assert greater control over its American colonies. In , Franklin testified in the British Parliament against the Stamp Act of , which required that all legal documents, newspapers, books, playing cards and other printed materials in the American colonies carry a tax stamp.

Although the Stamp Act was repealed in , additional regulatory measures followed, leading to ever-increasing anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies. In , he was part of the five-member committee that helped draft the Declaration of Independence , in which the 13 American colonies declared their freedom from British rule.

As minister to France starting in , Franklin helped negotiate and draft the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. In , Franklin left France and returned once again to Philadelphia. In , he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention.