{"product_id":"stealing-gods-thunder-isbn-9780812968101","title":"Stealing God's Thunder","description":"“Dray captures the genius and ingenuity of Franklin’s scientific thinking and then does something even more fascinating: He shows how science shaped his diplomacy, politics, and Enlightenment philosophy.”\u003cbr\u003e–Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday we think of Benjamin Franklin as a founder of American independence who also dabbled in science. But in Franklin’s day, the era of Enlightenment, long before he was an eminent statesman, he was famous for his revolutionary scientific work. Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray uses the evolution of Franklin’s scientific curiosity and empirical thinking as a metaphor for America’s struggle to establish its fundamental values. He recounts how Franklin unlocked one of the greatest natural mysteries of his day, the seemingly unknowable powers of lightning and electricity. Rich in historical detail and based on numerous primary sources, Stealing God’s Thunder is a fascinating original look at one of our most beloved and complex founding fathers.“The best study of Franklin as a scientist ever written.”\u003cbr\u003e–Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Absorbing . . . There are other Franklins–the entrepreneur, the diplomat, the statesman, the architect of independence– but in Franklin the scientist, Mr. Dray may have found the happiest one of all.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Delightful . . . Dray offers a survey of Ben Franklin’s scientific career, describing both the ridicule and glory that his experiments inspired.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A masterful glimpse of . . . Franklin’s work [and] a captivating cultural history of Franklin’s America.”\u003cbr\u003e–Publishers Weekly (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[An] illuminating study . . . elegantly written.”\u003cbr\u003e–Los Angeles Times\u003cb\u003ePHILIP DRAY\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“COTTON MATHER,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDAM YOU,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWITH A POX TO YOU”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBenjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth  of the seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, and the eighth child of  his father’s second wife, Abiah Folger. The Franklins lived on Milk  Street, across from the South Church, where Josiah was a leading member  of the congregation. Ben was carried across the street and baptized  there on the day of his birth. The Franklins ran a soap- and  candle-making business, and Josiah was also active in the community; he  had served as a constable of the town watch and also in the public  markets, neighbors sometimes came to him for advice, and the son would  recall that his father’s “great Excellence lay in a sound Understanding  and solid Judgment in prudential Matters, both in private and publick  Affairs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile still a toddler, Ben struck his parents as having the bearing of  a scholar. “I do not remember when I could not read,” Franklin later  said. An uncle (also named Benjamin) who resided with the Franklins and  took a special interest in his namesake perceived something remarkable  about his clever nephew, and wrote of the boy, “If the Buds are so  precious what may we expect when the fruit is ripe?” Josiah prided  himself that his youngest son might possess the makings of a clergyman,  although Ben’s unsuitability for the role manifested itself early on in  ways large and small, such as when he suggested to his father that if  all the meat being salted for the family’s winter provisions was  blessed at once, the family might avoid having to say grace at each  meal and “it would be a vast saving of time.” In any event, the  prerequisite education for the clerical calling proved too costly, and  after completing barely two years of school, Ben was put to work in the  family shop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBoston in the early 1700s was a thriving port of about ten thousand  inhabitants, the third largest shipping mecca in the British empire,  with fifteen shipyards and hundreds of wharves that teemed night and  day with the loading and off-loading of goods and passengers. Ben was  smitten with the magnificent sight of ships—the packets, cargo vessels,  and men-of-war that stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the docks and whose  vast sails filled the sky. The town’s seafaring character, with its  inlets, rivers, bays, ponds, and coves, engendered in him a lifelong  affection for boats and the sea. “Living near the water, I was in and  about it, learnt early to swim well, and to manage boats,” he recalled. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As the adolescent leader of a ragtag army of boys who played around the  large mill pond that began just beyond his father’s shop, Ben became  dissatisfied with the speed he could obtain through his regular  swimming strokes and experimented with ways to improve his efficiency  by attaching “palettes” (flippers) to his hands and feet. Already a  deft observer of the movements of air, water, and wind, he also  conceived of a most uncommon experiment, flying a kite while submerged  in the water. “Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes  around the pond, I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried  me quite over without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure  imaginable.” As the kite drew him swiftly from one side of the pond to  the other, a band of excited youngsters ran along the shore, shouting  and encouraging his progress.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of Josiah Franklin’s other sons, also named Josiah, had been lost  at sea, and the father, concerned about Ben’s evident fondness for  ships, sought to head off any seafaring inclinations the young boy  might have. But Ben was clearly apathetic about work in the family  trade, and the candle shop was not without dangers of its own: The  boiling vat Ben was made to stir was the very one in which another  brother, an infant named Ebenezer, had earlier drowned. “Under  Apprehensions that if he did not find [a job] for me more agreeable, I  should break away and get to Sea, as his Son Josiah had done to his  great Vexation,” Franklin later wrote, Josiah determined to establish  Ben in a trade. After a brief, unhappy turn at a cutlery shop, Ben  signed papers of apprenticeship to a printing business owned by his  older brother James.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames Franklin, nine years older than Ben, was a worldly sophisticate  by Boston standards. In 1717 he had visited London, where he had been  inspired by English satirists such as Joseph Addison, the Irish-born  Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe, and by the chatter of  anti-authoritarian opinion in London’s Grub Street coffeehouses. James  probably only marginally knew his kid brother and new apprentice,  although it immediately became clear that Ben possessed the attributes  necessary for work in a print shop—manual dexterity, mental quickness,  and physical strength.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As Ben would remember, “In a little time I made  great proficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my  brother.” He also dipped hungrily into James’s library, devouring books  on arithmetic and navigation as well as the many pamphlets and sermons  James printed that argued prevailing notions of theology, Deism, and  natural philosophy. He read the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s writings  urging moderation in human affairs and an end to religious zealotry,  John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Daniel Defoe’s  Essay on Projects, and Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the  Good—books that “perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an  Influence on some of the principal future Events of my Life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these books, Ben discovered a world of ideas to absorb and act upon.  By the time he was a teenager, he had declared himself a vegetarian,  perfected a “scientific” method of swimming, adopted Socratic inquiry  as a means of arriving at truth, and embraced Deism, the belief that  the world had been made by a gifted supreme being who was no longer a  living feature of the cosmos. This deus absconditus, apparently pleased  with his creation, had left it to its own devices; the Deists believed  that God’s endowment to mankind was reason and the practice of  benevolence toward others, and that Truth resided not in biblical  aphorism but in nature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe age in which Ben Franklin grew up, the early Enlightenment, was a  time of expanding faith in individual experience and  self-determination, an era of enlarged human curiosity, when advances  in natural philosophy, science, and technology were curbing man’s  reliance on magical or religious explanations for life’s hardships.  Like all such epochs of cultural transition, it arose from sources both  subtle and diverse, but certainly the English philosophers of the  seventeenth century and their Scientific Revolution had helped set the  stage. Its founding concepts lay in the ideas of Francis Bacon, who  promoted the value of experimentation and promised that work in pure  science would lead to useful applications, and John Locke, who urged  that true knowledge came not from a perfected obedience to inherited  beliefs but from mankind’s environment, as well as from the instruments  that made new forms of observation possible, such as the microscope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHovering majestically above all was Isaac Newton, the guiding  scientific thinker of his day, who showed in his Philosophiae Naturalis  Principia Mathematica, published in 1687 and known as the Principia,  that the functions of the universe were governed by mathematics.  Copernicus had made the sun, not Earth, the center of the universe;  Johannes Kepler described the planets’ orbits as ellipses; but where  others glimpsed a corner of the tapestry, Newton saw that the  whole—Earth and heavens alike—was a single system, bound by physical  laws. “The new [Newtonian] mechanics was the first example of a modern  science in its full development,” historian Dirk J. Struik notes,  “equipped with a convincing set of axioms, a logical method, a  developed technique and the power of forecasting events. Even those who  could not master the details could admire and follow its general  approach.” As Voltaire, who helped introduce Newton’s ideas in France,  observed, “Very few people read Newton, but everybody talks about him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuch reorganization of human thought did not come altogether easily to  the Boston of young Ben Franklin. New Englanders still lived to a great  extent in “an enchanted universe”—a place of dark, impenetrable  forests, vengeful thunderstorms, portentous comets, witches, and  ghosts. A belief in Providential events and omens was common, as was  the idea that an ongoing battle between Satan and God ruled many  features of daily life. For people who suffered from a myriad of poorly  understood health issues, whose children died in great numbers, and who  had no other means of comprehending the phenomenal world, Providence  and its signs offered at least the surety that man’s earthly trials had  some purpose. “In place of unacceptable moral chaos,” writes the  scholar Keith Thomas, “was erected the edifice of God’s omnipotent  sovereignty,” a presence that seemed particularly reasonable given the  Puritan assumption that God had a special interest in the fate of New  England.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Without doubt the Lord Jesus hath a peculiar respect unto this place,  and for this people,” preached the influential Boston cleric Increase  Mather. “Christ by a wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who  reigned . . . in these Ends of the Earth for Ages . . . and here the  Lord hath caused . . . New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis “peculiar respect,” however, contingent on the Puritans’  steadiness of faith, and known as the New England or Puritan covenant,  seemed depleted of late. A bloody conflict with the Indians in 1675–78,  known as King Philip’s War, had demoralized Massachusetts, Maine,  Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and forced the settlers to recognize  that they were capable of violent savagery equal to any the “savages”  could offer. Fires among Boston’s wooden houses and narrow lanes had  twice turned the city into a tinderbox, and in 1678 a deadly smallpox  epidemic arrived. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn August 1682 a bright, portentous sign (soon to be  known as “Halley’s comet”) crossed the New England sky, the mysterious  celestial visitor raising what Increase Mather called “Heaven’s Alarm  to the World.” In 1684 the long-standing charter of the Massachusetts  Bay Colony was abrogated by the English crown, diminishing the hegemony  of the Puritans and stirring political uncertainty. With  disillusionment spreading, clergymen worried about increased  Sabbath-breaking and even whispered about a rise in bestiality, a  trespass so Godless it was punishable by death. Finally, in 1692–93,  the infamous Salem witch trials occurred.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the witchcraft cases, twenty individuals were put to death, many on  what was known as “spectral evidence,” confessions by those who said  they were afflicted by specters, or accusations by people who claimed  to have seen their neighbors assume the forms of devils and witches.  Cotton Mather, Increase’s son and a ranking clergyman in his own right,  was asked by the judges to write a defense of the need for the trials.  Cotton made a nominal argument against the future reliance on spectral  evidence, but he was unable to keep himself from defending the Puritan  authorities as he lambasted others for Sabbath-breaking, adultery, and  drunkenness. Public unease over the executions, and new doubts about  the legality of spectral evidence as proof, helped lessen the  likelihood of further witch trials, but Mather’s arrogant, scolding  rant was long remembered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBen’s introduction to the new intellectual currents crossing the  Atlantic, gained among his brother’s books, was timely, for in the  spring of 1721 a crisis arrived that would test some of these  principles and plunge Boston, the Mathers, and both Franklin brothers  into a maelstrom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMen and women of the early eighteenth century called smallpox “the  speckled monster.” Of all illnesses it was perhaps the most horrific,  turning its victims into hideous sufferers, their limbs scarred, their  faces suppurating with diseased pustules. Several earlier outbreaks in  Boston had led to strict rules for the quarantining of incoming ships  and their crews, but there had been no local epidemic since 1702, and  by 1721 many of the former precautions had been allowed to lapse. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus  an entire generation had grown up with no exposure to the disease when,  on April 22, an epidemic rode into Boston Harbor aboard the H.M.S.  Seahorse, en route from the West Indies. Within a few weeks the first  cases of “the pox” were reported. Panic spread quickly across the  Charles River to Cambridge, where Harvard canceled its June  commencement exercises. As the disease claimed more victims, Governor  Samuel Shute called for a day of fasting and humiliation on June 27 to  combat whatever misdeeds “have stirred up the Anger of Heaven against  us.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo one watched these events more closely than Cotton Mather, minister  at Boston’s North Church. In 1713, Mather had written the first  layman’s guide to the treatment of measles, only to see his second  wife, Elizabeth, three of his children, and his maid succumb to the  disease—all in the same month. Mather had already lost his three oldest  children to illness in 1687, 1696, and 1699, and his first wife,  Abigail, had died in the smallpox epidemic of 1702. In total, he would  lose two wives and thirteen of his fifteen children to disease (or, in  one case, a birth defect), being survived by only two, Samuel and the  roguish Increase, Jr., known as “Creasy,” who had recently devastated  his father by dropping out of Harvard and “getting an Harlot big with a  Bastard.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor some time Mather had nurtured an interest in a little-known method  of disease prevention known as inoculation, which he had first learned  of from his slave, Onesimus, who had come to Mather in 1707 as a gift  from his congregation. Other slaves confirmed Onesimus’s claim that, in  Africa, inoculation—inserting a small amount of diseased material in a  vein to promote a mild case of smallpox so a greater one would be  avoided—was practiced and had proven effective. In 1713 Mather had  become one of the first Americans elected to the Royal Society of  London, the most prestigious scientific organization in the world. (Its  founding in 1662 was inspired by Bacon’s tenet that science be a  collaborative undertaking. The Society’s motto, “Nullius in verba” [“On  the word of no one!”], honored the idea that science must rest on  observation.) Cotton sent eighty-two letters describing American  natural curiosities and his experiments in corn hybridization to the  Society between 1712 and 1724.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMather saw not dissonance in the twin callings of science and faith,  but a powerful unification. “[Natural] Philosophy is no Enemy, but a  mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion,” he wrote. “The Whole World  is indeed a Temple of God, built and fill’d by that Almighty  Architect.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1699, the Royal Society had learned of early inoculation procedures  in China, and beginning in spring 1714, accounts of inoculation began  to appear in its publication, the Philosophical Transactions. A report  by Dr. Emanuel Timonius, a graduate of Oxford, was paired in an edition  of 1716 with an account by Dr. Jacobus Pylarinus, who had learned of  inoculation being practiced in Turkey. Mather also may have heard  reports of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British consul in  Constantinople, who reported in 1717 that Turkish peasant women held  “smallpox parties” for “engrafting” others with a minute amount of  smallpox matter. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn England, inoculation, known as “buying the small  pocks,” was tested on prison inmates and began to gather adherents,  although not quickly enough for Mather. “How does it come to pass that  no more is done to bring this operation into experiment and into  Fashion in England?” he demanded of a London correspondent in 1716.  “For my own part, if I should live to see the Small-Pox again enter  into our city, I would immediately procure a consult of our Physicians,  to Introduce a Practice [inoculation], which may be of so very happy a  Tendency.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMather was one of the few people in North America who had examined  pustules of smallpox through a microscope, and even as from his pulpit  he continued to deliver fiery jeremiads about sin and the Providential  calamities that awaited nonbelievers, he quietly came to embrace a most  rational notion, later to be known as “germ theory,” the idea that  pathogenic animalcules carry disease. “Every part of matter is  peopled,” he wrote. “Every green leaf swarms with inhabitants. The  surfaces of animals are covered with other animals. Yea, the most solid  bodies, even marble itself, have innumerable cells, which are crowded  with imperceptible inmates.” These tiny animals, breathed in by humans,  he believed, could attack the body’s organs. By receiving inoculation  in the arm, however, a person gave his body’s natural defenses an  opportunity to confront the invader at a safe, manageable remove,  before the organs could be reached.[quote] -- Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303749832933,"sku":"NP9780812968101","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812968101.jpg?v=1767737293","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/stealing-gods-thunder-isbn-9780812968101","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}