The Society for Useful Knowledge (10 page)

“For what can be more disheartening to an industrious laboring Man, than this, that after he hath earned his Bread with the Sweat of his Brows, he must spend as much Time, and have near as much Fatigue in getting it, as he had to earn it? …
A Plentiful Currency will encourage great Numbers of Laboring and Handicrafts Men to come and Settle in the Country
, by the same Reason that a Want of it will discourage and drive them out.”
³²

The members of the Junto were well aware of opposition to the issuance of paper currency among the wealthy and powerful, who feared that this would lead to inflation and eat away at the value of the interest payments they received from their many debtors. And so the Leather Apron men also argued that easier credit flowing from an enlarged money supply would accelerate construction, enhance trade, and strengthen other commercial activity. This would more than make up for any losses in the reduced value of interest payments.

The proposed currency would be in essence “Coined Land,” that is, bills backed by increasingly scarce provincial land that would ensure the value of the new paper money. Throughout the
Modest Enquiry
, the Junto's yardstick is clearly social utility: “I think it would be highly commendable in every one of us, more fully to bend our Minds to the Study of
What is the true Interest of
PENNSYLVANIA.”
³³

The partisans of paper currency eventually prevailed in the Pennsylvania Assembly over the interests of the province's financial elite, and the grateful victors gave a contract to print the notes to Franklin, their most articulate and persuasive advocate. “My friends there, who conceived I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money: a very profitable job and a great help to me. This was another advantage gained by my being able to write.”
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Soon, he was also printing the Pennsylvania colony's laws, another lucrative commission, as well as producing currency for neighboring Delaware and New Jersey. Additional government contracts followed.

The successful efforts of the Leather Apron men on behalf of paper currency represented their initial foray into public affairs, and it set the pattern for Franklin's lifetime of social, political, and intellectual activism. First of all, the campaign itself represented a collaborative endeavor, with Franklin the driving force and ringleader but others playing vital supporting roles. Many of the points advanced in his pamphlet were hashed out at the regular meetings of the Junto, allowing members to sharpen their thinking and argumentation before going public. This soon became common practice among the Leather Apron men.

The Franklin stove first took shape after a debate within the Junto over how best to combat the persistent problem of smoky chimneys and to reduce the consumption of increasingly scarce firewood. This same circle later deliberated the appropriate use of another Franklin invention, the lightning rod, posing the question: “May we Place Rods on our Houses to guard them from Lightning without being Guilty of Presumption?” In other words, did the installation of a lightning rod on a home, church steeple, or ship's mast amount to interference in God's plan, or otherwise undercut his agency and power, as some conservative critics had charged?

The Junto did not dismiss divine providence but simply argued that “in Reason's Eye Lightning or Thunder is no more an Instrument of Divine
Vengeance than any other of the Elements.” And it was unequivocal in its endorsement of this useful new technology: “So far from being Presumption to use [the lightning rod], it appears foolhardiness to neglect it.”
³⁵
Franklin propagated this same view in the second series of his famous almanac,
Poor Richard Improved
, in which he suggested a role for divine agency in the discovery of such useful protection against “Mischief by Thunder and Lightning.”
³⁶

Franklin's New Printing-Office enabled him to present his views and those of the Junto directly to interested residents of the province. Franklin's subsequent publishing ventures, chiefly the
Pennsylvania Gazette
newspaper and
Poor Richard's Almanack
, cast even wider nets. “I endeavored to make it [the
Almanack
] both entertaining and useful.… And observing that it was generally read, scarce any Neighborhood in the Province being without it, I considered it as a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.”
³⁷
Poor Richard's Almanack
and its successor,
Poor Richard Improved
, sold as many as ten thousand copies a year and served as a virtual cash machine for the man who was literally printing money.

The newspaper was perhaps even more important for shaping public opinion. “I considered my Newspaper also as another Means of Communicating Instruction, and in that View frequently reprinted in it Extracts from the [British magazine]
Spectator
and other moral Writers, and sometimes published little Pieces of my own which had been first composed for Reading in our Junto.”
³⁸
Small broadsheet newspapers such as Franklin's
Gazette
proved increasingly popular in the colonies. Almost two dozen such publications were launched between 1713 and 1745.
³⁹

Likewise, Franklin's successful lobbying for the position of America's deputy postmaster was predicated, in part, on his desire to use its official privileges to dispatch his growing scientific correspondence free of charge. Of course, the steady salary and inherent prestige were very real inducements. But, as Franklin explained to a London colleague, this new, more senior office—he had been Philadelphia's local postmaster since 1737—offered considerable influence over colonial information flows and would place him at the center of America's most important exchange of news and information, including the latest in scientific discoveries. “It would enable me to execute a Scheme long since formed [for a philosophical society] … which I hope would soon produce something agreeable to you and to all Lovers of Useful Knowledge, for I have now a large Acquaintance among ingenious Men in America.”
⁴⁰

Before the introduction of the postal stamp, recipients paid substantial fees when collecting their mail, while letters sent by the postmaster carried no such expense. This meant that Franklin could act as a convenient clearinghouse for scientific reports, receiving the originals and then distributing copies to America's virtuosi, precisely the task of secretary that he had already spelled out in his plan for a national philosophical society.

News and information that came to his attention in his official capacity—the Philadelphia post office was maintained at his print shop—routinely ended up in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
before it could reach competing publications. Franklin also established new, faster postal routes, including the introduction of stagecoach runs and overnight service between major cities, and pioneered delivery to the extremes of the British settlements. By the end of his tenure, post roads had been surveyed and established from New York into Canada, and from Maine to Florida. Ever the practical man, Franklin was willing to meet the going rate to purchase the office of deputy postmaster, but only within reason. “The less it costs the better, as 'tis an Office for Life only, which is a very uncertain Tenure.”
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Other Junto projects followed the successful campaign for a paper currency. Each new enterprise emulated the pattern established by the club's initial success, and each was grounded in the related notions of social utility and social improvement. Thus, a debate within the Junto about the danger of fire in Philadelphia's narrow confines led to the formation of volunteer fire companies across the city and, later, to the creation of America's first fire insurance scheme, with Franklin at its head. Under the influence of the Leather Apron men, police protection was bolstered and a program of regular road repair and street cleaning was instituted. Franklin's design of an improved oil lamp that required less maintenance and cast a brighter light enhanced municipal lighting. Junto members also led the way in the creation of the city hospital and the founding of an academy that would in time become the University of Pennsylvania.

Most important among the Junto's early projects—especially for the development of science and technology in the American colonies—was the founding of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731. Initially, the Leather Aprons pursued a modest plan to pool their small private collections into a shared library for ready consultation by all. When that proved something of a disappointment—they were regularly losing track of their valued volumes or
found too much overlap in titles—the Junto launched a subscription library, the backbone of America's first major public collection. Many of the early subscribers were artisans and craftsmen.

Naturally enough, the Library Company's early purchases reflected the central interests and concerns of its founders, directors, and subscribers, all of whom put a premium on self-improvement over classical conceptions of knowledge, wisdom, and mystery. Works of science, chiefly basic mathematics, as well as history and literature, predominated, together accounting for more than two thirds of the company's initial book order from London. Unlike the few American universities of the day, created to turn out an educated clerical class, the Library Company devoted little shelf space to theology, and almost none to the classic texts of the Greek and Roman authorities.
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Over the ensuing decades, Americans' taste in books coalesced securely around works of practical information. In an “examination of the state of literature in
North America
” published in 1789, the British lawyer and essayist Leman Thomas Rede reported that American letters lacked “those dignified literati, who in Europe obtain the adulation of the learned parasites” but more than made up for it through “the possession of all useful learning.” Summing up the American book market, Rede concluded, “Whatever is useful, sells; but publications on subjects merely speculative, and rather curious than important … lie upon the bookseller's hands.”
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Franklin and the small circle of Junto members were not alone, of course, in their interests or pursuits. There were stirrings of similar impulses toward self-improvement and practical knowledge across the province of Pennsylvania and throughout the British colonies. In Philadelphia, two dozen or so of the city's tradesmen, professional men, and craftsmen formed the Union Library Company in 1747, offering low-cost access to several hundred titles.
⁴⁴
Another group of mostly Quaker artisans, including a cabinetmaker, a clockmaker, and a pharmacist, created the Association Library Company of Philadelphia, while the Amicable Company was formed around the same time by city laborers. These separate collections later merged with the original Library Company to form a single citywide system.
⁴⁵

This library movement, backed by improvements in communications, advances in education, and better domestic printing technology, resonated throughout the colonies.
⁴⁶
The New York Corporation Library was created in 1730 and opened to the public sixteen years later. The oldest lending
collection in the country, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum of Newport, Rhode Island, was founded in 1747 with a mission to create “a collection of useful Books suitable for a Public Library … having nothing in View but the Good of Mankind.”
⁴⁷
Charleston's Library Society dates to 1748. The few colonial colleges of the day gradually expanded their own holdings well beyond their traditional preserve of theology, while other private or subscription libraries flourished.

At all these institutions, directors and readers alike demanded access to up-to-date technical knowledge, contemporary political philosophy, and the latest accounts of scientific experimentation. Books on modern farming techniques were particularly popular, while only a single lowly Latin grammar graced the Library Company of Philadelphia's bookshelves. Much sought after were the writings of the British empiricist philosopher John Locke—“Esteemed the best Book of Logic in the World,” according to a notation in the Library Company's first printed catalog. Works of cutting-edge science in the new collection included
A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy
, by Franklin's old coffee-house acquaintance Henry Pemberton, and other similar texts.
⁴⁸

Thomas Penn invoked the utility of the Library Company when he pledged the full support of the proprietary family: “I shall always be ready to promote any Undertaking so useful to the Country, as that of erecting a common Library in this City.”
⁴⁹
Given the intense interest of the institution's founders in experimentation and the application of practical knowledge, the library soon expanded beyond a mere repository of the written word to become an early seedbed of scientific discovery. The Penns donated an air pump and later “a complete Electrical Apparatus” to the Company, allowing members to explore for themselves the composition of the atmosphere and the phenomenon of electricity, matters then being hotly pursued in England and on the Continent.

The Quaker merchant Peter Collinson, the Library Company's chief book buyer in London and an informal scientific adviser to Franklin and his circle, sent along accounts of the latest German research into the nature of electricity. He also included a special glass tube, for the generation of static electricity, with which members of the Company, prominent among them the founders of Franklin's Junto, began their own investigations.

“Your kind present of an electric tube, with directions for using it, has put several of us on making electrical experiments, in which we have observed some particular phenomena that we look upon to be new,” Franklin replied to
Collinson, assuring him the gift was being put to good use.
⁵⁰
Philip Syng, the Junto's silversmith, even built a hand generator of the Americans' own design—“like a common Grind-Stone”—to further their efforts, which culminated in the triumphal proof, later presented to the Royal Society of London, that lightning and electricity were one and the same.
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