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Speaker 1: During the COVID crisis, and when I was hanging around

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Speaker 1: Elon Mosque, I was in an airless, windowless conference room

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Speaker 1: down in Bokachika, Texas and Star Base, and of course

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Speaker 1: nobody was wearing masks because they were all accolytes of

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Speaker 1: the mosque. But one of the things I did is

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Speaker 1: i'd sneak into the conference room sometimes and make sure

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Speaker 1: the vent fan was always on. I wasn't very sure

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Speaker 1: about cloth masks or anything else, but I knew if

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Speaker 1: you were with a group of people in a room,

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Speaker 1: you should make sure the windows are open, because that's

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Speaker 1: what Franklin taught us. There's a really amusing scene where

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin is traveling with John Adams to meet with

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Speaker 1: a British emmissary to see if they can avert the revolution,

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Speaker 1: and Adams and Franklin have to share a room at

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Speaker 1: an end, and Adams has a cold, and Franklin keeps

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Speaker 1: opening the window and Adams says, no, no, shut the window,

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Speaker 1: I have a cold. And Franklin explains his theory of

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Speaker 1: colds and airborne organisms, and Adams, who's not a very

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Speaker 1: funny fellow. Right in his journal, Franklin droned on and

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Speaker 1: on until I finally fell asleep and the window was

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Speaker 1: left open, and indeed Franklin doesn't catch the cold.

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Speaker 2: Walter, welcome, Thank you very much, Evan. Great to be

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Speaker 2: with you. Yeah, it's great to talk to you.

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Speaker 3: I am very excited to talk about mister Benjamin Franklin.

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Speaker 3: Doctor Benjamin Doctorlyn Yes Franklin.

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Speaker 1: Even though it's not exactly an Urn doctorate, he got

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Speaker 1: many honorary ones and loved the title.

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Speaker 3: The proper respect should be showed, respect must be paid.

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Speaker 3: Over the past year, I had an ongoing conversation with

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Speaker 3: the famed biographer Walter Isaacson about writing about research and

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Speaker 3: of course, about the subjects themselves. You may have heard

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Speaker 3: the first part of our conversation in a Musk when

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Speaker 3: we talked about his experience studying the controversial tech mogul.

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Speaker 3: Some of the things we discussed, both about innovation and

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Speaker 3: about the state of our polarized politics. Maybe want to

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Speaker 3: reach back into the past and look at some of

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Speaker 3: Walter's historical subjects. So we turned to a figure that

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Speaker 3: Walter can't stop thinking about, Benjamin Franklin, a man who

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Speaker 3: straddled the worlds of science, media and government in America's

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Speaker 3: turbulent founding era, to see if he could help us

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Speaker 3: make sense of today's turbulent times. Where were you in

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Speaker 3: your life when you decided that you were going to

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Speaker 3: pursue a biography of Franklin and what was about him

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Speaker 3: that sort of grabbed you.

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Speaker 1: I came to Benjamin Franklin having written about Henry Kissinger

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Speaker 1: and foreign policy. Kissinger was very much a raal politique realist,

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Speaker 1: and I wanted to look at the roots of that

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Speaker 1: tension between realism and idealism in American foreign policy. And

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Speaker 1: it takes you back to Benjamin Franklin. He is both

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Speaker 1: the ultimate realist and the ultimate idealist. So I thought, wow,

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Speaker 1: I should go back and do Benjamin Franklin. But then

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Speaker 1: the second thing that struck me is that his balance

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Speaker 1: of power, diplomacy, and the checks and balances, all the

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Speaker 1: things he did derived from his science.

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Speaker 3: It wasn't easy for someone like Franklin, who had limited means,

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Speaker 3: to transition seamlessly from printing to science to politics, and excel.

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Speaker 2: In all three.

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Speaker 3: This remarkable versatility became the foundation of Franklin's and during

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Speaker 3: influence I was especially interested to learn about Franklin the scientists.

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Speaker 3: It's the part of the my new least well, or

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Speaker 3: at least not beyond the idea that he discovered electricity.

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Speaker 3: More on that in a bit, and Isaacson tells me

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Speaker 3: it's his scientific curiosity and exploration that lays the groundwork

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Speaker 3: for some of his most important work as a founding father.

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Speaker 3: For Franklin, being a scientist was not a profession or

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Speaker 3: a strict field of study. It was a state of

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Speaker 3: mind driven by curiosity and a tendency towards self directed learning.

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Speaker 3: And of course there was still so much to discover.

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Speaker 2: Nowadays.

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Speaker 1: In our generation you had people who were great humanist, great,

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Speaker 1: but they would tell, oh, I can't do physics, I

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Speaker 1: can't do man, you know, I don't.

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Speaker 2: Do any of that.

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Speaker 1: But he or his younger friend Jefferson would have thought

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Speaker 1: you were a philistine if you did keep up with science. Well,

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Speaker 1: does reconnect it for Benjamin Franklin, somebody whose experimental nature,

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Speaker 1: whose search for evidence informed everything he did. So that

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Speaker 1: made me you want to write about all the facets

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Speaker 1: of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, Benjamin Franklin, the entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin,

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Speaker 1: the business person who creates a media Empire, Benjamin Franklin,

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Speaker 1: the diplomat. All of this wove together, and I felt, nowadays, boy,

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Speaker 1: we really need Benjamin Franklin.

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Speaker 2: So that's why I immersed myself.

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Speaker 1: At that time, you felt we need Benjamin, and all

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Speaker 1: the more so today I want.

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Speaker 3: To go all the way back, start at the beginning,

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Speaker 3: and try to figure out how he became one of

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Speaker 3: the foremost scientists of his age.

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant

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Speaker 1: to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as a tenth son,

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Speaker 1: he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord.

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Speaker 1: His father was going to send him to Harvard to

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Speaker 1: study to be a minister, and Franklin wasn't exactly cut

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Speaker 1: for the cloth.

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Speaker 2: At some point, they were.

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Speaker 1: Assaulting the provisions for the winter, and he said to

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Speaker 1: his father, why don't we just say grace over.

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Speaker 2: Him right now?

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Speaker 1: We get it done for the entire the next few months.

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Speaker 1: And so his father realized, well, that would be a

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Speaker 1: waste of money to send him to become a minister.

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Speaker 1: He was always a spunky lad, and he loved to

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Speaker 1: think of himself as a leader among the boys. He

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Speaker 1: was the one who led the other kids to stealing

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Speaker 1: rocks so they could build a dam in the Boston

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Speaker 1: Harbor where they could swim, and he invented ways to

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Speaker 1: do swimming, including paddles and flippers.

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Speaker 3: Franklin becomes an autodidact, less by choice than by the

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Speaker 3: fact that his dad decides that this particular son is

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Speaker 3: probably not worth the investment of a Harvard education.

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Speaker 1: He becomes a person always curious. He read about everything

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Speaker 1: from history to science. He watches how whirlwinds form. He

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Speaker 1: eventually discovers how storms move up the coast because he's

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Speaker 1: interested in a kneeclipse that is happening. So it's that

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Speaker 1: insatiable curiosity I think was almost created when he was

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Speaker 1: denied the right to go to college. So he gets

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Speaker 1: his hunger for teaching himself.

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Speaker 3: And this sort of ability to see the world in

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Speaker 3: a way that you feel you can figure it out

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Speaker 3: if you see something around you. In Benjamin Franklin, it

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Speaker 3: prompted an idea that he could solve it, that he

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Speaker 3: could understand something that maybe hadn't been understood.

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Speaker 1: This was the gift of the scientific revolution that had

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Speaker 1: occurred just before Franklin's time, which is the universe wasn't

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Speaker 1: just a total mystery. There were things you could figure

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Speaker 1: out about it. How storms moved, how eclipses happened. Now

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Speaker 1: that seems pretty obvious, but you have to remember before

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Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, we thought wisdom was received as opposed to

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Speaker 1: let's figure out nature. And so Franklin becomes the pioneer

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Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment in America. Unlike Newton Galileo, he doesn't

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Speaker 1: have a lot of math. He doesn't do the theories.

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Speaker 1: But as he says, as a practical person, you don't

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Speaker 1: need to know the theory of gravity to know that

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Speaker 1: if you let go of a piece of crockery, it'll

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Speaker 1: fall to the floor and break. Among the things Franklin

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Speaker 1: studied as an experimentalist and a tinker is just simple phenomenon,

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Speaker 1: the lightning rod being the most famous. But then how

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Speaker 1: does dark cloth absorb heat better than light cloth? And

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Speaker 1: he did experiments where he put black pieces of cloth

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Speaker 1: on snow and then lighter pieces of cloth and measured

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Speaker 1: which would melt the snow underneath faster.

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Speaker 3: It almost sounds like something you would do in the

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Speaker 3: eighth grade or even elementary school science project. And the

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Speaker 3: idea that at the time he could conceive these experiments

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Speaker 3: and just do them on his own. He could just

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Speaker 3: execute them and make a discovery.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, we had great theorists right before from Fanklin who

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Speaker 1: understood the nature of light and heat. But then you

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Speaker 1: have Franklin doing experiments we all did. It's like, okay,

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Speaker 1: a light piece of cloth and a dark one, what's

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Speaker 1: going to get warmer? But what Franklin does is he

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Speaker 1: always looked for practical ways to use that your clothes

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Speaker 1: in summer should be light and in winter should be dark.

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Speaker 1: He also tinkered and created a wood burning stove we

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Speaker 1: now call the Franklin stove, and it was about the

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Speaker 1: simple thing of how do you get more heat into

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Speaker 1: the room with less smoke. And these type of things

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Speaker 1: may seem mundane compared to Newton figuring out a theory

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Speaker 1: of gravity, but in our daily lives having clean burning stoves,

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Speaker 1: bifocal glasses, understanding the heat absorption of cloth, a urinary

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Speaker 1: Catherine when his brother was having a urinary tract disease,

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Speaker 1: Franklin is able to make it flexible, easy to insert.

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Speaker 2: And this is just his way of using both.

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Speaker 1: Science and ingenuity to create new technology, which is what

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Speaker 1: we try to do in our modern age.

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Speaker 3: When we come back, Franklin's scientific discoveries make him an

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Speaker 3: international celebrity, and we'll even dig into that rumor about

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Speaker 3: Franklin wanting to bump the bald Eagle and make the

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Speaker 3: humble Turkey America's official bird. There's this story of Benjamin

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Speaker 3: Franklin and his ingenuity that every school kid knows. It

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Speaker 3: involves a man in long socks, a kite, a key.

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Speaker 2: And a lightning storm.

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Speaker 3: But it isn't just his discovery of electricity and conductivity

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Speaker 3: that makes this moment special. As with all franklin scientific explorations,

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Speaker 3: it led to something practical, an invention that saved countless lives.

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Speaker 2: I asked Walter about that.

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Speaker 3: I did not realize how famous he became just from

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Speaker 3: the lightning rod, particularly in France, and it's sort of

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Speaker 3: foreshadowing for later what he's able to do diplomatically for

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Speaker 3: the New America. A lot of it is derived from

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Speaker 3: this fame that he's accrued because he invented the lightning rod.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of odd, but up until then people believed

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Speaker 1: they were bolts from heaven and an expression of God's will,

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Speaker 1: and they would consecrate the bells of churches to water

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Speaker 1: off the lightning, but even the most religiously faithful were

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Speaker 1: likely to have noticed that it was not very effective.

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Speaker 1: Lightning kept hitting church peoples. In Germany. During one period

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Speaker 1: thirty five years, three hundred and eighty six churches were

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Speaker 1: struck and in venice like three thousand people were killed

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Speaker 1: when tons of gun power had been stored in the

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Speaker 1: church and it was hit. Franklin later wrote to John Winthrop,

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Speaker 1: who was a Harvard professor, and he wrote, the lightning

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Speaker 1: seems to strike steeples of choice just as the bells

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Speaker 1: are ringing. One would think we might now try some

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Speaker 1: other trick to ward it off.

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Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin again.

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Speaker 1: His electricity experiments when a showman came down from Boston

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Speaker 1: who was doing static electricity, you know, rubbing a glass

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Speaker 1: with cloth and then making little sparks. What Franklin does

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Speaker 1: is he mixes this sort of fun you have with

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Speaker 1: a parlor trick using static electricity with theories from reading

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Speaker 1: the other great scientists of the time. In the journal

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Speaker 1: that Franklin kept for his experiments, he noted in seventeen

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Speaker 1: forty nine that there were some similarities between electrical sparks

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Speaker 1: and lightning, and being the type of bookkeeper he was,

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Speaker 1: he listed twelve of them. They both give light, they

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Speaker 1: have the same color, the crooked direction of swift motion,

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Speaker 1: the sulfur of smell. Very Franklin like. He puts his

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Speaker 1: rallying cry at the bottom of the notebook page, let

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Speaker 1: the experiment be made. You know, great theorists like Newton

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Speaker 1: had noticed the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but

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Speaker 1: nobody had written, let the experiment be made.

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Speaker 2: Uh huh.

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Speaker 1: So Franklin lays out a methodical test for figuring out

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Speaker 1: exactly what lightning is, and it's a rather complicated thing.

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Speaker 1: He describes how you would make an electrical stand that's

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Speaker 1: grounded but has an iron rod that's connected to the earth,

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Speaker 1: and how many feet And he also discovered that pointed

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Speaker 1: pieces of metal attract sparks better than rounded pieces. So

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Speaker 1: he does all of these very specific descriptions of how

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Speaker 1: to do the experiment, and it's done actually in France first,

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Speaker 1: before he has a chance to erect all the apparatus

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Speaker 1: in Philadelphia.

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Speaker 3: But even though he wasn't there to do the experiment,

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Speaker 3: he becomes famous for having designed the experiment.

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Speaker 1: Absolutely The King of France has read about Franklin's proposed experiments,

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Speaker 1: and the King asks people in France to try to

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Speaker 1: carry them out, and these are known as Franklin's experiments.

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Speaker 2: And then what happens when he finally arrives in France.

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Speaker 1: When he arrives in France, he is known as the

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Speaker 1: great scientist who tamed lightning, and so he's enormously famous.

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Speaker 1: Crowds turn out in Brittany when he lands. They carry

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Speaker 1: him to the steps of the academy when he gets

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Speaker 1: to Paris so that he can hug Voltaire. He also

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Speaker 1: is a good public relations guy. And so Franklin, who

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Speaker 1: had hardly ever been to the backwoods and lives in Philadelphia,

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Speaker 1: Boston and London his whole life. Where's a fur cap

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Speaker 1: he had gotten during one trip to Canada and pretends

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Speaker 1: to be the back wood sage and scientists, and they

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Speaker 1: were veeram and the women start wearing their hair and

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Speaker 1: what was called the coiffor la la Franklin, which is

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Speaker 1: their hair done up as if it's a fur cap

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Speaker 1: on their heads.

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Speaker 3: It's wild to think of them as such a celebrity.

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Speaker 3: And then you realize at this point his popularity is

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Speaker 3: just from the lightning rod, even though he also invented

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Speaker 3: or goes on to invent so many other things. But

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Speaker 3: my question is, why didn't you patent the lightning rod?

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Speaker 3: I mean, it feels obvious for a man like Franklin,

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Speaker 3: a successful business owner, if he just taken a percentage

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Speaker 3: on every rod, his descendants could still live off that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, he talks about how much it could have made

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Speaker 1: had he patented the lightning rod idea or patent.

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Speaker 2: In the stove.

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Speaker 1: But he always felt that it was part of your

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Speaker 1: civic duty to be inventive, and that we gained so

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Speaker 1: much from previous inventions that we should be happy to

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Speaker 1: put things back in the river of history. So his

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Speaker 1: experiments that come to the conclusion of the single fluid

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Speaker 1: theory of electricity, the invention of batteries in which you

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Speaker 1: can store electricity, the invention of lightning rods so you

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Speaker 1: can draw electricity from the clouds, those are the most

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Speaker 1: important experimental discoveries of his era. But he just wants

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Speaker 1: to say, what use is it. At one point, after

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Speaker 1: a season of electricity experiments, he said, we discovered all

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Speaker 1: sorts of things, but we hadn't figured out what the

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Speaker 1: use of it would be and so they draw a

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Speaker 1: lot of electricity stored in batteries and then use the

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Speaker 1: shocks to kill turkeys. And he said they were uncommonly tender,

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Speaker 1: and so we Southerners liked to think he's the inventor

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Speaker 1: of the first fried turkey.

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Speaker 3: Hold on, speaking of turkeys, what to quickly address this

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Speaker 3: rumor that you hear periodically around Thanksgiving that Ben Franklin

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Speaker 3: wanted the turkey as America's national bird instead of the

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Speaker 3: bald eagle.

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Speaker 1: I think he thought the bald eagle was too proud,

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Speaker 1: And it was in one of his writings where he

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Speaker 1: didn't want there to be an aristocracy called the Cincinnatis Club,

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Speaker 1: people who had started with Washington were supposed to be part.

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Speaker 1: He said, no, no, we're not trying to do that. And

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Speaker 1: he then does this little divergence where he doesn't want

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Speaker 1: the eagle to be the symbol of United say it's

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Speaker 1: should be the turkey because the turkey reminds us, you know,

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Speaker 1: we're a little bit silly. We shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

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Speaker 1: And he does this pay on to the turkey. I'm

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Speaker 1: much more practical, and I don't know, he just thought

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Speaker 1: we shouldn't get too grand.

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Speaker 2: We should poke fun at our pretensions.

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Speaker 3: We're going to take a quick break, but when we

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Speaker 3: come back, we'll look at how Franklin's scientific inquiry bled

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Speaker 3: into all parts of his life, including how he managed

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Speaker 3: to keep a cool head while helping found it in nation.

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Speaker 3: One of the things about Ben Franklin is that being

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Speaker 3: a scientist is foundational. It shapes him as a person

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Speaker 3: and spills into all his different interests, but he's always

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Speaker 3: kind of doing it on the side. When does it

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Speaker 3: really become a focus for him?

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Speaker 1: By age forty two, he had probably become the most

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Speaker 1: successful self made person in the colonies. He had not

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Speaker 1: only created print shops, but he enfranchised them up and

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Speaker 1: down the coast. He had helped create a colonial postal

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Speaker 1: system to tie these print shops together. He created Poor Richard,

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Speaker 1: and he created newspapers, and so this makes him very successful.

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Speaker 1: But at that point he wants to change his life

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Speaker 1: a bit, and so he retires, partly so that he

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Speaker 1: become more of a civic citizen, even more than he

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Speaker 1: had been before, but also somebody who was interested in

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Speaker 1: everything from the sparks of electricity and lightning to diplomacy.

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Speaker 3: What do you think it was about his outlook on

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Speaker 3: life that caused him to have this almost like sense

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Speaker 3: of fun and scientific adventure about exploring all of these

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Speaker 3: different areas.

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Speaker 1: There are very few people in history who really have

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Speaker 1: a hunger to learn everything possible about everything that you

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Speaker 1: could know. I mean, that's certainly true of Leonardo da Vinci.

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Speaker 1: It was everything from a musician to a mathematician, to

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Speaker 1: an artist to an engineer. It was true of maybe Aristotle. Well,

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Speaker 1: it's definitely true of Benjamin Franklin.

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Speaker 3: And he must have had an innate ability to not

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Speaker 3: be concerned about being wrong or being called a dabbler.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that if somebody called him a dabbler

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Speaker 1: an amateur, he would take it as a compliment. He

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Speaker 1: really loved being ingenious and trying to be interested in everything,

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Speaker 1: and I think he thought if he were blinder and

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Speaker 1: too focused, he wouldn't be able to be as creative

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Speaker 1: or as imaginative. He also just loved science for its

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Speaker 1: own sake, the fascination of experiments, and that included when

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Speaker 1: he's in France after the Revolution, he's helping fun the

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Speaker 1: first flights of hot air balloons, just because he's totally fascinated.

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Speaker 1: When a spectator asked, what is the use of these

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Speaker 1: new balloons? What are they good for? Franklin said, what

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Speaker 1: is the use of a newborn baby. Franklin realized that

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Speaker 1: curiosity for its own sake, we may not know what

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Speaker 1: it will grow into, but we should always expect that

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Speaker 1: things will grow and they'll become useful.

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Speaker 3: But he didn't lose the rest of his life on

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Speaker 3: it experiments. He just did experiments while he was doing

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Speaker 3: everything else.

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Speaker 1: Even when he's in England trying to negotiate for the

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Speaker 1: colonies and prevent the revolution, he's still pursuing scientific inquiries.

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Speaker 1: It's his hobby. So he helped put the lightning rods on

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Speaker 1: Saint Paul's Cathedral.

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Speaker 2: That's where he does.

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Speaker 1: His theories of the common cold. That's where he does

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Speaker 1: theories of exercise, where he sees how much heat you're

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Speaker 1: generating when you do different types of exercises, and sort

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Speaker 1: of comes up with this notion of what we now

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Speaker 1: called calories. He looked into lead poisoning why the oceans

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Speaker 1: were salty. He actually got.

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Speaker 2: That one wrong.

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Speaker 1: But even inventing things like musical instruments.

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Speaker 3: You mentioned in being wrong That's another aspect of it

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Speaker 3: is it's not just about making discoveries and proving things,

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Speaker 3: but it's about this sort of iteration and revision and

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Speaker 3: evolution where you might get it wrong, but then you've

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Speaker 3: still moved scientific knowledge forward.

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Speaker 1: He liked testing things out and being open to evidence.

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Speaker 1: The basic scientific method which Franklin embraced, which is to

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Speaker 1: have a theory, figure out a way you can test it,

360
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Speaker 1: then revise your theory based on the evidence you get.

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Speaker 1: That scientific method sounds so simple to us. It's so obvious.

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Speaker 1: You got a theory, test it, and by the way,

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Speaker 1: if the evidence comes back, figure out a new theory.

364
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Speaker 1: And that notion helps him understand how science intersects with

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Speaker 1: public policy. One of the things we don't do very

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Speaker 1: well is let people change their minds. We always say, well,

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Speaker 1: you flip flopped, or you change your mind. Well, Franklin

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Speaker 1: often evolved. He evolved on slavery, he evolved on immigration.

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Speaker 1: And having that open mind in which you're willing to

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Speaker 1: accept new evidence and revise your opinions. That's the essence

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Speaker 1: of the scientific method. But it's also the essence of democracy.

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Speaker 3: And for someone who is so detail orient to he

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Speaker 3: seemed to push the notion of imperfection, that imperfection needed

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Speaker 3: to be allowed in the Constitution. It's sort of funny

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Speaker 3: to think about today when there's so much reverence for

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Speaker 3: the founding fathers. So they've written the perfect documents, and

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Speaker 3: those documents need to be respected letter by letter and

378
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Speaker 3: word by word. But he seemed to have a notion

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Speaker 3: of we're not going to achieve perfection.

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Speaker 1: His closing speech in the Constitutional Convention is really a

381
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Speaker 1: document that everybody should read. He was the oldest person

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Speaker 1: by far at the Convention, twice as old as the

383
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Speaker 1: average member, and he says, I confess that I do

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Speaker 1: not entirely approve this Constitution at present. But he said,

385
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Speaker 1: the older I get, the more I realize that I'm

386
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Speaker 1: wrong at times, and which seems like an imperfection to me. Well,

387
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Speaker 1: maybe it's the right way to do it. And so

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Speaker 1: he says, I endorse this Constitution with all of its

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Speaker 1: perhaps flaws, because I'm not sure now that they are flaws,

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Speaker 1: or that we could get something more perfect came out

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Speaker 1: of human hands.

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Speaker 3: And of course there were cases where he was right,

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Speaker 3: and one of them is the Gulf Stream.

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Speaker 2: Can you walk us through how you figure that out.

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Speaker 1: Even as he's traveling across the ocean coming back to

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Speaker 1: Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five, for instance, There he is

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Speaker 1: standing on the deck of the boat with his grandson

398
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Speaker 1: Temple and hearing that it takes longer to get back

399
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Speaker 1: to America than it does to get to Europe. And

400
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Speaker 1: he's going, why is that? Why is that? And so

401
00:24:27,359 --> 00:24:31,960
Speaker 1: he measures, with his grandson helping him, the temperature of

402
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Speaker 1: the water. And he's devised a barrel that has a

403
00:24:35,760 --> 00:24:38,200
Speaker 1: flap to it that he can open so he can

404
00:24:38,240 --> 00:24:41,880
Speaker 1: take the temperature at different depths to see how deep

405
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Speaker 1: the Gulf stream is.

406
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Speaker 3: And something that is now confirmed by satellites that match

407
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Speaker 3: up to a picture that he created just by lowering

408
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Speaker 3: barrels into the water.

409
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Speaker 2: It's extraordinary.

410
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Speaker 1: If you see the chart he makes, it's remarkably similar

411
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Speaker 1: to the one that's now on the NASA web site.

412
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Speaker 1: In fact, the NASA website reprints a picture of Benjamin

413
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Speaker 1: Franklin's chart. Franklin was a great believer in the future.

414
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Speaker 1: In his will, he set up to trust funds for

415
00:25:14,600 --> 00:25:20,920
Speaker 1: aspiring entrepreneurs like himself, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia.

416
00:25:21,560 --> 00:25:26,720
Speaker 1: The revolving loan fund in Philadelphia was particularly interesting because

417
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Speaker 1: it accrued just as the way he said it did,

418
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Speaker 1: and two centuries after his death the fund had reached

419
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Speaker 1: more than two million dollars, and at one point it

420
00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:40,359
Speaker 1: was used by kids in inner city Philadelphia to make

421
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Speaker 1: electric go kart type things to race in one of

422
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Speaker 1: these solar races. So I love the idea of the

423
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Speaker 1: person who help us harness electricity also having a loan

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Speaker 1: fund of people doing it in the twenty first century.

425
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Speaker 3: And was there a tiny bit of ego in it too,

426
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Speaker 3: that his name was sort of carry along with those

427
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Speaker 3: he couldn't have known maybe how big his name would

428
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Speaker 3: continue to be anyway.

429
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Speaker 2: Oh, I think he knew.

430
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Speaker 3: Franklin was someone who cared deeply about the legacy he

431
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Speaker 3: would leave not only as a scientist and a civic leader,

432
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Speaker 3: but also as a man with some pretty big regrets

433
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Speaker 3: of a.

434
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Speaker 2: More personal nature.

435
00:26:18,560 --> 00:26:21,800
Speaker 3: Next time, on on Benjamin Franklin, we dive into Franklin's

436
00:26:21,840 --> 00:26:26,040
Speaker 3: early life. He was a printer, a businessman, and a rebel.

437
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Speaker 1: Franklin has a very complicated family life, and throughout his

438
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Speaker 1: life he had kept this ledger of errors he had

439
00:26:34,880 --> 00:26:38,280
Speaker 1: made and how he had rectified and mistake number one

440
00:26:38,440 --> 00:26:41,840
Speaker 1: in his ledger book was running away from his brother.

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Speaker 3: This show is based on the writing and research of

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Speaker 3: Walter Isaacson. So Stedd by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed

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Speaker 3: and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our

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Speaker 3: consulting producer Lizzie Jacobs, who's our editor.

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Speaker 2: Social media by Dara Potts. This show was.

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Speaker 3: Engineered at CDMU Studios from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers

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Speaker 3: are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was

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Speaker 3: executive produced by Mangeshetigador, with an assist from Oz Walishan

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Speaker 3: Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman,

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Speaker 3: Conel Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan on

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Speaker 3: Tuski and Alie Gavin.

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Speaker 2: And.

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Speaker 3: If you like podcasts about inventions what they mean for humanity,

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Speaker 3: check out my other show shell Game, about how it

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Speaker 3: created an AI clone and set it loose on the world.

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Speaker 2: It's at shell Game dot co.

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Speaker 3: And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit

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Speaker 3: Kaleidoscope dot NYC.

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Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening