CONTENTS
I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES
II. ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN
III. STEAM IN CAPTIVITY
IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND
V. THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
VI. AGENTS OF COMMUNICATION
VII. THE STORY OF RUBBER
VIII. PIONEERS OF THE MACHINE SHOP
IX. THE FATHERS OF ELECTRICITY
X. THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE AGE OF INVENTION
CHAPTER I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES
On Milk Street, in Boston, opposite the Old South Church, lived Josiah
Franklin, a maker of soap and candles. He had come to Boston with his
wife about the year 1682 from the parish of Ecton, Northamptonshire,
England, where his family had lived on a small freehold for about three
hundred years. His English wife had died, leaving him seven children,
and he had married a colonial girl, Abiah Folger, whose father, Peter
Folger, was a man of some note in early Massachusetts.
Josiah Franklin was fifty-one and his wife Abiah thirty-nine, when the
first illustrious American inventor was born in their house on Milk
Street, January 17, 1706. He was their eighth child and Josiah's
tenth son and was baptized Benjamin. What little we know of Benjamin's
childhood is contained in his "Autobiography", which the world has
accepted as one of its best books and which was the first American book
to be so accepted. In the crowded household, where thirteen children
grew to manhood and womanhood, there were no luxuries. Benjamin's period
of formal schooling was less than two years, though he could never
remember the time when he could not read, and at the age of ten he was
put to work in his father's shop.
Benjamin was restless and unhappy in the shop. He appeared to have no
aptitude at all for the business of soap making. His parents debated
whether they might not educate him for the ministry, and his father took
him into various shops in Boston, where he might see artisans at work,
in the hope that he would be attracted to some trade. But Benjamin saw
nothing there that he wished to engage in. He was inclined to follow the
sea, as one of his older brothers had done.
His fondness for books finally determined his career. His older brother
James was a printer, and in those days a printer was a literary man as
well as a mechanic. The editor of a newspaper was always a printer and
often composed his articles as he set them in type; so "composing" came
to mean typesetting, and one who sets type is a compositor. Now James
needed an apprentice. It happened then that young Benjamin, at the age
of thirteen, was bound over by law to serve his brother.
