Wizards of America - Benjamin Franklin

Well met, Wizards one and all,

As always, we hope that the day finds you in good health and high spirits!

As the United States enters its 250th year, the Grey School of Wizardry is taking a moment to look back at some of our nation’s wisest figures. Over the next year, we’ll be celebrating one American Wizard each month, reflecting on how they thought about the world, how their influence still rings true for the world of today. Along the way, we’ll also take time to look at the moments that shaped their lives, their beliefs, and the paths which they chose to walk.

To begin this series, we start with perhaps one of the most recognizable of them all, Mr. Benjamin Franklin. As a Founding Father of the American experiment, Franklin was one of the figures who took to pen and press to carry Enlightenment ideas into everyday American life, translating philosophy that had crossed the Atlantic into something readable and usable by ordinary people.

Franklin’s early years explain a great deal about why he approached knowledge the way he did. Born in Boston in 1706 as one of seventeen children, he was apprenticed as a teenager to his brother James, a printer by trade. Anyone who has ever worked closely with a sibling can appreciate that this arrangement was not always an easy one. The apprenticeship was strict, often tense, and sometimes outright harsh, leaving Franklin with little formal education beyond basic schooling. What he did have, however, was access to a print shop, and that mattered more than it may first appear...

Surrounded daily by books, pamphlets, and newspapers, Franklin began teaching himself by reading everything that passed through his hands. And once he had a taste for it, he was hooked. He copied essays by writers he admired, rewrote them from memory, and then took the time to compare his versions to the originals to see where he fell short. This was the mind not only of a thinker, but of a tinkerer, someone willing to pull ideas apart and put them back together again.

That apprenticeship taught Franklin something else as well, something that stayed with him for the rest of his life: ideas only matter when they can be communicated and acted upon. This lesson followed Franklin when he eventually left Boston and made his way to Philadelphia in 1723, arriving nearly broke and known to almost no one. He came ashore hungry, tired, and carrying little more than a small bundle of clothes, a few coins, and his experience as a trained printer. Within days of arriving, he found work with Samuel Keimer, a printer who had recently set up shop in the city. Keimer’s operation was modest and often chaotic, but it gave Franklin something important: steady work, access to equipment, and room to prove himself.

Franklin didn’t stay a junior hand for long. His skill, discipline, and ability to keep the presses running smoothly quickly set him apart. By 1724, he was managing much of Keimer’s printing work, and when the business faltered, Franklin’s reputation followed him rather than the shop. After a brief return to London to expand his technical knowledge of the trade, he came back to Philadelphia in 1726 with sharpened skills and a clearer sense of how a successful printing business should operate.

In 1728, Franklin entered into a partnership with Hugh Meredith, and the following year, 1729, they established their own printing shop in Philadelphia. That same year, Franklin purchased The Pennsylvania Gazette, a struggling newspaper he steadily transformed by improving its writing, expanding its relevance, and making it genuinely useful to its readers. The shop operated under Franklin’s name, and by 1732, he began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack, which would run annually for the next twenty-five years. None of this happened overnight of course and each step rested on savings carefully kept and a growing reputation for reliability that made people willing to take a chance on him.

As Franklin became better known for his work as a printer and writer, his daily life pulled him into closer contact with the practical limits of the city around him. Philadelphia was growing quickly, and growth has a way of revealing what isn’t yet ready to support it. Fires spread faster than people could respond, books were difficult to come by, and care in times of illness depended more on circumstance than planning. Franklin noticed these things not as distant problems, but as features of ordinary life, the kind you trip over simply by paying attention.

Rather than waiting for direction to arrive from somewhere else, he began talking with others who saw the same gaps and wondered what might be done about them. Those conversations turned into small experiments in cooperation, and over time into lending libraries, volunteer fire companies, and civic groups that changed how the city functioned day to day. This kind of work asked something different of him. The effects were immediate, visible, and often imperfect, but they could be felt. Problems were no longer theoretical. They were close at hand, and they responded when people acted together.

Running alongside all of this was Franklin’s growing interest in natural philosophy. His experiments, particularly with electricity, grew out of the same habit of careful attention he’d practiced since his youth. He corresponded widely with scientists in Europe, shared his results openly, and refined his thinking through response and critique. When he flew his famous kite, it wasn’t for spectacle. It was to confirm a hypothesis, one that led directly to the invention of the lightning rod. For the first time, churches, public buildings, and even homes could be protected from fires caused by lightning strikes, and Franklin made a deliberate choice that says much about him. He refused to patent the lightning rod or profit from it, believing that knowledge which preserved life should be shared freely.

By the time Franklin entered politics, first as a colonial representative and later as a diplomat, his reputation rested on a long record of work that had already crossed borders. He was known in Europe as a successful printer and publisher whose writings circulated widely, as a scientist whose experiments with electricity had been read, tested, and replicated abroad, and as a civic organizer whose projects actually functioned. His papers on electricity had earned him membership in learned societies, including the Royal Society in London, and his correspondence with European thinkers placed him firmly within the intellectual world the French respected. Long before he spoke for America, he had shown that he could observe carefully, think clearly, and share knowledge without hoarding credit.

That reputation mattered when he arrived in France during the Revolutionary War. Franklin was already familiar, a practical philosopher whose work had demonstrated consistency over time. He understood that trust in a foreign court isn’t granted because of rank, but because a person’s past conduct suggests they won’t embarrass their hosts or waste their patience. Franklin dressed plainly, spoke sparingly, and listened more than he talked, allowing his established reputation to carry weight rather than forcing it forward. At the same time, he was very much a man of appetite and charm, something the French noticed immediately. His enjoyment of conversation, good food, and the company of women became part of his legend rather than a mark against him.

While Franklin was in France, rumors followed him almost immediately, and they were hardly subtle. He was widely believed to be romantically involved with several women, including Madame Helvétius, a prominent salon hostess whose home Franklin frequented, and his fondness for flirtation became a regular subject of gossip in Parisian society. His letters, filled with wit, innuendo, and... playful observation, circulated among friends and admirers, reinforcing the image of an aging philosopher who remained very much alive to pleasure and company. These stories were not hidden, nor were they treated as scandal in the French context. Rather, they became enjoyed as part of his public persona.

In a culture that prized charm, and social ease, Franklin’s reputation as a man comfortable among people mattered as much as his scientific credentials. He moved easily through salons, listened attentively, laughed readily, and made others feel at ease in his presence. This combination of intellectual credibility and social warmth made him approachable rather than aloof, and it helped establish trust long before formal negotiations ever began.

When Franklin returned to America later in life, his engagement didn’t wane, even as his health did. He took part in drafting the Constitution and strongly supported compromises he personally disliked for the sake of stability. He also lent his voice to causes that demanded moral clarity in early America, including the first echoes of the abolitionist movement. He understood that progress in the republic must come slowly, shaped by patience and persistence rather than purity of position, and in that it should find the purchase it needs to stand the test of time.

Why Franklin’s influence remains visible is because so much of what he helped build became, well, ordinary! Public libraries, volunteer fire companies, civic associations, scientific collaboration, and the expectation that useful knowledge should circulate freely are now simply part of American life. They work quietly and well, which is why they’re easy to overlook, and that quiet endurance is itself part of Franklin’s legacy.

We call Franklin a Wizard because he understood how ideas move through people, and indeed, time. He learned carefully, acted deliberately, and placed what he knew in service to others, again and again. As America looks ahead to its next 250 years, his life reminds us that wisdom isn’t loud and it isn’t ornamental. It’s practiced, shared, and proven over time, which is why Benjamin Franklin remains a fitting place to begin.