One curious result of the experiments made by Dr. Watson and his friends, and which they themselves probably did not expect, was the breaking out of a sort of public frenzy for making like trials, but after the most childish fashion. Everybody who had, or thought he had, the least tincture of science in him, procured a long glass tube, and went on rubbing it assiduously with his handkerchief, sitting in dark rooms and cellars, so as to be better able to watch the first appearance of the ‘electric fire.’ Ladies and gentlemen alike went on rubbing, with desperate energy, as if the fate of the world depended on their exertions. They sold ‘electrical tubes’ in pastry shops; every draper praised his own handkerchiefs as the best for rubbing; and lecturers upon electricity went about through the length and breadth of the land, with glass rods in their hands, delivering wonderful harangues, and trying to explain to gaping multitudes the mysteries of nature as regards electricity. The lecturers even crossed the Atlantic to America, visiting the chief towns, and preaching to large assemblies in places--
Where blind and naked ignorance Delivers brawling judgments, unabashed On all things, all day long.
If it was a ludicrous spectacle to see these wandering lecturers, with their glass tubes and pocket-handkerchiefs, the movement nevertheless produced, apparently quite by accident, a striking result. It occurred through one of the peripatetic preachers of electric revelation coming face to face with Benjamin Franklin, a printer established at Philadelphia, when on a visit to his native town of Boston, Massachusetts, North America.
There are, in the records of scientific discovery, few figures so interesting, because so full of marked individualism, as that of Benjamin Franklin. He was not a man of genius, in the accepted sense of the word; nor was he even a man of high talents. But he was nevertheless a decidedly great man, his greatness consisting in the largest development of that undefined faculty known as common sense. Benjamin Franklin was the very ideal of a ‘practical’ man, that is, a man valuing thoughts only as leading to actions, and new ideas only as the road to visible results. The success of his career in life was but an illustration of his thoroughly practical character. Born at Boston in January 1706, the son of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, he was destined by his parents to follow the same trade, but not relishing the melting pots, he got apprenticed to an elder brother, a printer at Boston. Harsh treatment drove him away from this place before the terms of his apprenticeship were over, and with scarcely a penny in his pocket, and the experience of only seventeen years in his brain, he made his way to Philadelphia. A year after, when eighteen years of age, he was induced to sail for England, and was fortunate enough to find employment as a compositor in a printing office in London, but so poor as to be compelled to take a lodging for eighteen-pence a week. However, his self-reliance never deserted him; he managed to go unscathed through all the perils of poverty and friendlessness in a great city, and after a few years went back to Philadelphia, with a small stock of money and a wealth of experience. He now set up as a master printer, and gradually, though by very slow degrees and ceaseless toil, devoted to multifarious objects, rose into prosperity. For upwards of twenty years, from 1728 to 1748, he was the most energetic and active man of business in Philadelphia. He was not only a printer, but an author, an editor of newspapers, a compiler of almanacks, a publisher, a bookseller, a bookbinder, and a stationer. He made lamp-black and ink; he dealt in rags; he sold soap and geese feathers; also, as he frequently made known to his fellow-townsmen in printed notices, he had always in stock ‘very good sack at six shillings a gallon.’ To dispose of the numerous articles in his store he invented the art of advertising, unknown before him at Philadelphia. All the inquiring minds of the ‘Quaker City’ assembled regularly in the shop of Benjamin Franklin, ‘the new printing office near the market,’ which came to form the centre of intelligence, and the source from which all public movements went forth.