The Electric Social Network of Benjamin Franklin
How public science and the Republic of Letters created an American icon
Introduction
Few things provided men and women of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment with as much wonder, scholarship, and entertainment as electricity, and no one exemplified this fascination more than American colonial icon Benjamin Franklin. Electricity had become a singular focus for him in the late 1740s and early 1750s. He performed countless experiments, repeating things painstakingly in order to understand this marvel. He made mistakes, but took them in stride, as he shows in his 1747 letter to friend and patron Peter Collinson: “If there is no other Use discover’d of Electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain Man humble.” [1] He invented things, made important discoveries, but also had fun with this natural phenomenon people were just beginning to harness, with no better example than the parting words of a letter he wrote to Collinson in 1749, about a party he was to throw to celebrate the end of the year’s experimenting season:
“A Turky is to be killed for our Dinners by the Electrical Shock; and roasted by the electrical Jack, before a Fire kindled by the Electrified Bottle; when the Healths of all the Famous Electricians in England, France and Germany, are to be drank in Electrified Bumpers, under the Discharge of Guns from the Electrical Battery.” [2]
During the Enlightenment in British Colonial America, the study of electricity wasn’t only--or even mostly--practiced by academics in laboratories, but by a community of people who were not necessarily highly educated in mathematics or science, in public places like town squares, public lecture halls, salons, and parlors. People discussed electricity in a network of letters that cris-crossed the Atlantic Ocean and traversed the borders of many countries, between dozens of correspondents. Colonial Americans experienced and marveled at electricity, and by attending public demonstrations, they grew conversant and curious about its shocking features.
Focusing on Benjamin Franklin demonstrates how extensive this network of letters was in just this one subject with this one correspondent. Because of his experience in printing, his station as Postmaster, and his precocious personality, Franklin was uniquely situated to make use of both the study of electricity and the Republic of Letters to not only elevate his own status, but that of his entire young nation between the years of 1746 and 1790.
[1] Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, August 14, 1747, in Franklin Papers, http://franklinpapers.org.
[2] Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, April 29, 1749, in Franklin Papers, http://franklinpapers.org.
Franklin was a central figure in the science of electricity in the eighteenth century. Few people who studied electricity within the Atlantic network were not connected to him by way of correspondence. His letters, accessible during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic shut-downs thanks to Yale’s and the American Philosophical Society’s online collection, allow us to see the man behind the legend. We can see his successes, his concerns, and even his failures, usually delivered with a dose of sarcasm. His letters show his personality in a way his biographies can’t, allowing scholars to get a feel for the times in which he experimented, and also to appreciate the breadth of people he communicated with, from politicians and scientists to poets and artists, all of whom were interested in electricity. The online database of letters is searchable by keyword, making it a feasible task to find those letters applicable to my research among thousands of others.
My work builds upon past research but goes a step further to take a more interdisciplinary approach, combining scholarship on Benjamin Franklin, electrical science during the Enlightenment, and the Republic of Letters into a comprehensive view of how history, science, society, and geography combined to create an environment where a man like Franklin could flourish—and, indeed, how Franklin’s various careers and talents, along with his endeavoring personality, allowed him to take advantage of all of these factors like possibly no one else could.
Historiography
Benjamin Franklin has, of course, been the subject of an exorbitant amount of research. There are books and articles about every aspect of his life: his childhood, his religious beliefs, his cultural impacts, and even his unique relationship with French women. Most of his biographies, however, focus mainly on his political life rather than his scientific one. Three of the most recent books on his life, H.W. Brands’s The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, [1] Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, [2] and Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, [3] while all thorough and well-researched volumes, only devote a few pages to Franklin’s scientific achievements.
Brands’s The First American is a Pulitzer Prize finalist work that was one of the first to use Franklin’s unpublished letters, which gave Franklin’s life further dimensionality. The author wanted to bring Franklin from the tall tale hero he’d become to real life, where he was just as impressive, if not more.
Isaacson’s bestselling Benjamin Franklin focuses on how Franklin shaped American identity. The author goes through each of the phases of Franklin’s life to discuss how the man was shaped by circumstances around him, and how he in turn shaped events. Isaacson also comments on the dichotomy of supporters of Franklin versus his attackers in his conclusion and gives a historical look at how Franklin’s name has been used in American literature after his death.
Wood’s study of Franklin in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, likewise, tries to address the mythology of Franklin as opposed to the real man. Wood’s goal with this book is to not just strip away the mythological Franklin, but to study how this “symbolic Franklin” [4] was created.
[1] H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).
[2] Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).
[3] Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
[4] Wood, 16.
There are books that focus solely on his scientific life, however, with great detail, putting his work into the context of the times in which he lived, introducing other actors in eighteenth-century science, and discussing his impact on not just electricity, but other sciences as well.
I. Bernard Cohen’s Benjamin Franklin’s Science, [1] published in 1990, takes a very scientific look at Franklin’s life. Cohen outlines Franklin’s experiments very specifically and thoroughly and discusses them in the context of letters Franklin wrote to others about his work. This book is focused on the science more than the society around it and could serve as a science text almost as well as it could a history one.
Joyce E. Chaplin’s The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, [2] published in 2006, focuses on Franklin’s scientific life and the world around it. Like the title suggests, Chaplin focuses on what impacts science had on the American Benjamin Franklin. She masterfully weaves the science and history into a book that is readable and comprehensive. Science was woven into the many things Franklin did over the course of his life, and Chaplin is able to unweave these threads to show how.
Michael Brian Schiffer’s Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment, [3] published in 2003, narrows the focus to Franklin’s work only on electricity, and uses Franklin as a fulcrum for discussion of electrical science during the eighteenth century as a whole.
[1] I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[2] Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
[3] Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003.
Many scholars have delineated the performative and public nature of Enlightenment science in general, and electricity in particular. Franklin lived in an age where scientific research was conducted in a much more public way than it might be today. Skills were honed as much in a public forum as they were in a private laboratory. The Enlightenment has been called an “age of wonders,” because it was a time when common people could be illuminated by the marvels of the natural world, displayed by the men--and sometimes women--who held the power to harness them. Electricity was something new to most people, especially because of the recent invention of the Leyden jar (Figure 1, below), which allowed static electricity to become portable. Franklin’s discovery and explanation of positive and negative charges and the balance between them brought experimentation further, bringing the usage of the Leyden jar and other apparatus to new levels. People of the Enlightenment didn’t want to rely on superstitions and miraculous explanations for the natural world. They wanted to understand how it truly worked. Reason and logic were championed. [1] Franklin’s work on lightning in particular embodied this and was admired for it. People no longer needed to be irrationally afraid of lightning; it was no longer seen as a punishment from the divine, but a natural phenomenon that could be explained, and even, with the invention of Franklin’s lightning rod, controlled. [2]
Figure 1. Leyden Jar, a glass jar with metal foil cemented to the inside and out, with a rubber stopper with a metal conductor running through it. (Artist unknown, Public Domain)
In his 1970 book Science in the British Colonies of America, [3] Raymond Phineas Stearns describes how science was practiced in the colonies region by region and has a section highlighting certain notable scientists who made their mark. He also discusses the colonies’ role in the larger world. Simon Schaffer’s article, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” [4] from 1983 uses electrical sciences as a case study for the public and active nature of eighteenth-century science. In 2002, Patricia Fara’s short book An Enlightenment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment [5] introduces readers to the many people who contributed to the study of electricity in Europe and America during the enlightenment. James Delbourgo’s A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America [6] (2006) is an often-cited work that covers many aspects of electricity in eighteenth century America which draw attention to the fact that Franklin was not the only person studying and popularizing electrical science in America at that time. Together, these works provide a comprehensive view on the Atlantic world of electricity in the 1700s.
The more public display of the science of electricity at that time spawned a lot of discussion among people, not only face to face, but through letters. During the age of Enlightenment, there was a network of communication cast throughout the Atlantic and European world called the Republic of Letters. Members of this “Republic” included people like Voltaire, David Hume, John Locke, and of course, Benjamin Franklin. Many topics were discussed in this social network of the Enlightenment, from natural to intellectual to political philosophy and more.
In her paper “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters,” [7] Lorraine Daston discusses some of the historical accomplishments of the Republic, namely the beginning of objective thought, and of looking at correspondence with scientists differently from those of friends. She says in this period of growth, scholarly letters took a form of that between things meant to be read by someone in particular, and things meant to be read in public. [8] People were starting to keep themselves out of their science.
Karel Davids discusses the role of three places, Britain, America, and the Dutch Republic in the circuits of information in his article “The Scholarly Atlantic.” [9] Specifically, he addresses the emerging role of America in the Republic of Letters, saying it was in part due to the “patient, methodical network-building by Benjamin Franklin.” [10]
Caroline Winterer is part of a team at Standford University that is mapping the network of the Republic of Letters. In her article “Where Is America in the Republic of Letters,” [11] she addresses America’s role, as well as that of other cities. She comments that America’s role was slow to grow because so many people went to England for their education or business, since it was the hub of their empire. [12]
All of the above speak about the Republic of Letters in a general sense. With my research, I delved deeper into the singular topic of electricity, which was an important part of science communications in the Republic and looked solely at the letters to and from Franklin about electricity. This allowed me to not look superficially at the network of letters, as the Stanford project did with an algorithm to count and track correspondence, but to read the letters and get a feeling for who these people were and what roles they played. Putting these letters into context of the eighteenth century and looking at the values and practices of science at the time allowed me to make a more intimate interrogation of the primary sources, and mapping the letters allowed me to see a visual network of who was involved in the electrical conversation of the eighteenth century.
[1] James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006): 99.
[2] Cohen, 30.
[3] Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
[4] Simon Scaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, no. 1 (March 1, 1983), 1-43.
[5] Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
[6] James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
[7] Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters,” Science in Context 4 No. 2 (January 1, 1991), 367-386.
[8] Daston, 371.
[9] Karel Davids, “The Scholarly Atlantic: Circuits of Knowledge between Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Americas in the Eighteenth Century,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 224-248.
[10] Davids, 228.
[11] Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 597-623.
[12] Winterer, 604.
Electricity in the 1700s
In America during the Age of Enlightenment, scientific knowledge was shared differently than it is now. Colleges existed in America and abroad (indeed, Franklin himself founded one), but most people gained knowledge in a more practical and accessible way: by watching demonstrations, pondering what they had seen, and then trying to replicate the demonstration themselves. This is what Franklin did after seeing Dr. Archibald Spencer perform his demonstration in Boston in 1746. [1] He procured the same equipment as Spencer had, and began to practice using them until finally, his experiments were good enough to show others. Ebenezer Kinnersley watched Franklin experiment until he became adequate at demonstrating electricity, and he travel the colonies to show hundreds of people his electrical show. [2] The study of electricity leant itself particularly well to being studied and shown outside the lab. During the Enlightenment, natural philosophers subscribed to the idea of Newtonian science, that of experience and experimentation, rather than to Aristotelian science, the type of learning that happened in schools which relied more on logic and thought. [3] This allowed people who were not scholars per se to study and practice science. According to Karel Davids, “Learning by watching, hearing, and feeling was more common than learning by reading and writing” during the Enlightenment. [4]
A broadside advertisement for an exhibition by Ebenezer Kinnersley, 1752. American Philosophical Society.
In the later nineteenth century, science and its applications, especially those of electricity, began to be seen as a form of capital, and several companies started to sequester scientists in their own private corporate labs. When developments were made, they were considered to be trade secrets. As time progressed, the only way someone could become a reputable scientist or engineer was to go to a college or university, or at the very least, partake in an apprenticeship program. [5] This meant only people who could afford the proper training could enter the world of science. This was not so in the eighteenth century. In the Enlightenment, science was indeed commercialized, but as a spectacle, not as knowledge. People paid great sums of money to be electrified. Franklin told his friend John Lining in a 1755 letter that he knew of someone who made enough money with their demonstrations to travel around the Atlantic and European worlds in comfort. [6]
In the 1700s, electricity was a point of discussion, not just at venues like the universities or the Royal Society, but in people’s living spaces, salons, public fora, and in letters written back and forth. Unlike later times, there was no competition between people for publication rights of information. When someone had an idea, even if it seemed off the wall, they discussed that knowledge with others and created experiments based on their idea. People weren’t afraid their ideas would be “stolen,” and they didn’t feel the pressure to publish something before others learned of it. Knowledge, equipment, and inspiration were shared far more freely than they are today. Franklin was constantly writing to people outlining full experiments he’d performed in the hopes they would try them as well. His kite experiment, as well as others, were replicated in Europe in order to show they worked and to see new things about the experiment that the original performer might have missed. [7]
Part of the reason for this sharing was the growing popularity of science in the Age of Enlightenment. Society considered science a subject appropriate to discuss in polite and mixed company. [8] This wasn’t just because it was an amusement, though it was at that. During the Enlightenment, people believed science and rational thought would lead to progress of mankind, not just intellectually, but politically and in other ways as well. [9] People who held knowledge had an elevated social and even religious status. To understand natural philosophy was to understand God’s world better, and therefore it meant a scholar could be closer to the divine. [10] Kinnersley, Franklin’s protégé, was an ordained minister. [11] Religion and the pursuit of knowledge did not have to be at odds with one another.
[1] Cohen, 40; Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 154.
[2] Franklin, Autobiography, 155.
[3] Fara, 16.
[4] Davids, 226.
[5] Thomas P. Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983), 142.
[6] Benjamin Franklin to John Lining, March 18, 1755, in Franklin Papers, http://franklinpapers.org.
[7] Cohen, 5.
[8] Delbourgo, 110.
[9] Fara, 16.
[10] Delbourgo, 103.
[11] Delbourgo, 94.
Correspondence and Community
Electricity was the perfect science for the cosmopolitan ideal of the Enlightenment. With the popularization of the Leyden jar and other portable apparatus, demonstrations of electricity were fairly simple to do and could be done almost anywhere. [1] In British Colonial America, people from England would often come over to show their electrical displays from city to city. This fascinated crowds, and soon early Americans created their own demonstrations. Electricity became a parlor trick for polite society.
Since electricity was an experimental science at that point and not strictly theoretical, people didn’t need a strong background in math or science to be able to share in the experience. Franklin only had two years of formal education in his youth, and he wasn’t an outlier. People knew just enough about electricity to ask a lot of questions without being intimidated by not knowing as much as someone else and sounding ignorant. Within such an environment, as Stearns argues, Benjamin Franklin’s “naiveté prompted him to present his thoughts about electricity without fear of attack or contradiction, in language as fresh as the ideas themselves, interlarded with wit, humor, and unusual clarity.” [2] In Colonial America, people experimented with science because of personal interest rather than as a career path. [3] Open accessibility to information was important.
How did one gain access to information about electricity? There were many ways people learned about science, including schools, exhibitions, discussions in salons, and dinner parties. A major way learning took place in the eighteenth century, however, was through correspondence and community.
In Europe, it had become fashionable in the 1700s to belong to salons or musées, clubs people paid dues to in order to attend lectures and demonstrations about science. [4] Electricity in particular lent itself well to public demonstration, since it was, quite literally, sensational. [5] People could see and hear sparks from Leyden jars, and in some demonstrations, could even feel them. Demonstrations included models of houses being struck by “lightning,” [6] machines playing tunes on bells by way of “Electric Fire,” [7] and people being subjected to “electerising” in such a way that sparks would come from their fingers. [8]
In England, France, and other European nations, there were royally sponsored groups that shared scientific ideas, like the Royal Society in London. Europe also had universities that, in addition to their normal classes, offered public lectures as well. Most of these things cost some amount of money and weren’t accessible to the poor. [9] They did, however, open the doors for many more people than would have otherwise had awareness of science, including many women. Women were, indeed, the very subjects of some of these electrical demonstrations, such as Venus’s Kiss, a display in which a woman behaved as a conductor of electricity. When a young gentleman from the audience volunteered to kiss her, he was given a shock upon performing the gesture, due to the completion of the electrical circuit. [10]
Benjamin Franklin contributed to the scientific community in America by forming a junto in Philadelphia in 1727, a group that would meet to have conversations about various philosophical and scientific topics. [11] In 1731, he started the Library Company of Philadelphia, which was the first library in the colonies. [12] Then, in 1743, he proposed the founding of the American Philosophical Society, which used the British Royal Society as a model. [13] This was all before he’d started his experiments with electricity.
Once he wrote his book about electricity based on a series of letters between himself and Peter Collinson entitled Experiments and Observations on Electricity, [14] Franklin was intent upon getting the attention of the Royal Society in London, as well as other electrical scientists in Europe. After several tries and much frustration, he managed to get the attention of William Watson, who read Franklin’s work and shared his enthusiasm for it at a meeting of the Royal Society. [15] Franklin had made his way into the circle of the Society, and by extension, the Republic of Letters.
[1] Davids, 233.
[2] Stearns, 642.
[3] Stearns, 641.
[4] Michael Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006): 72.
[5] Schaffer, 9.
[6] Delbourgo, 99-100.
[7] William Northrop Morse, “Lectures on Electricity in Colonial Times,” The New England Quarterly 7, no. 2 (June 1934):369.
[8] Morse, 364.
[9] Lynn, 51-52; Delbourgo, 94; Morse, 373.
[10] Delbourgo, 41.
[11] Brands, 92.
[12] Isaacson, 103.
[13] Benjamin Franklin, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America,” Broadside, May 14, 1743, http://franklinpapers.org
[14] Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin, and Communicated in several Letters to Mr. P. Collinson, of London, F.R.S. London (St. John’s Gate: E. Cave, 1751) http://franklinpapers.org
[15] Benjamin Franklin and William Watson, "An Account of Mr. Benjamin Franklin's Treatise, Lately Published, Intituled, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America; By Wm. Watson, F. R. S." Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) 47 (1751): 202-11.
Franklin's Electrical Correspondence
In order to ascertain the extent of Franklin's influence in the eighteenth-century world of electricity, I looked at over three hundred letters that matched my criteria for this project. The letters had to be either to or from Franklin himself, they needed to mention electricity in more than just a single-phrase referential way, and they needed to be in actual letter form.
There are limitations to this project due to the historical nature of the sources, namely letters. We only have access to the letters people kept after they received them. Some people might have thrown letters away, other letters might have been lost. If someone was not a notable figure at the time of their death, any letters in their possession might have been disposed of. A disclaimer for any project of this nature is that the data is limited to what exists now, rather than what actually existed in Franklin's time. It's valuable to think of this as a sample of a larger whole.
In the figure to the right, you can see a map I created using ArcGIS Online after creating a database with data I collected from the letters.
The majority of the three hundred letters traveled to and from Pennsylvania, London, and Paris. This isn't surprising, since those are the three places Franklin spent most of his life. These places are also considered to be the hubs of intellect in the eighteenth century. [1] What is interesting are the many other places, places Franklin never went near, that he was connected to via correspondence, such as Vienna, Turin, Brussels, and Pomerania.
[1] Delbourgo, 40; Winterer, 612.
This graph compares how many of the letters I examined came from a colony or country versus how many were received. While these numbers are not necessarily representative of the actual number of letters sent and received because many letters did not survive to be collected and published, we can see there is a pattern that shows what other scholars have suggested: Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), New York (New York), England (London), and France (Paris) all have a strong presence in the Republic of Letters and eighteenth-century correspondence. Centers of learning and centers of shipping seem to go hand in hand. [1] Franklin lived in Philadelphia, London, and Paris as well, which of course impacted the numbers of letters sent and received in these places, but when one looks at the people to and from which he was sending and receiving letters, a majority of them were from these cities as well, even before Franklin traveled there.
[1] Winterer, 603-605; Delbourgo, 15.
The three hundred letters I studied included just over one hundred correspondents, and of those, about a quarter of all the letters were between Franklin and either Caldwallader Colden, a scientist and personal friend of Franklin’s in New York, and Peter Collinson, his friend and patron in London. Other correspondents included Pieter van Musschenbroek, inventor of the Leyden jar, David Hume, the famed Scottish philosopher, Rudolph Erich Raspe, author of the Baron Munchhausen stories, and Mary Stevenson, an artist. All of these people were curious about electricity. Some wanted to perform experiments, and others wanted to write fan mail to a scientist whose work they admired. The graph to the right shows the names of Franklin’s correspondents who wrote about electricity, and how many letters were sent between them.
Interactive Map
This is an interactive map I created with ArcGIS Online showing the places from which Benjamin Franklin received letters about electricity, as well as where he sent them. As you can see, the majority of the letters traveled to and from Pennsylvania, England, and France. This isn't surprising, since those are the three places Franklin spent most of his life. What is interesting are the many other places, places Franklin never went near, that he was connected to via correspondence. All in all, over fifty cities were involved in his letter network.
If you click on a dot, you can see how many of letters about electricity in Franklin's network were sent to and from that state or country. If you zoom in on a location, you can get a clearer view of what cities received and sent letters besides the large centers of Philadelphia, London, and Paris.
Conclusion
Franklin corresponded with people about electricity for the rest of his life, as can be seen in the graph in Figure 5. He served as a fulcrum for this science in the Atlantic world, a role just as important as that of his political and diplomatic one, and indeed, possibly more important, for without his science, which was made possible by the openness with which people shared knowledge in the eighteenth century, he might never have been a stateman at all. [1]
[1] Cohen, 38; Chaplin, 5.
Bibliography
Primary Sources:
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Franklin, Benjamin, and Wm. Watson. "An Account of Mr. Benjamin Franklin's Treatise, Lately Published, Intituled, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America; By Wm. Watson, F. R. S." Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) 47 (1751): 202-11.
Franklin, Benjamin. “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America.” 1743.
Franklin, Benjamin. Letters. http://www.franklinpapers.org/ .
Secondary Sources:
Aldridge, A. Owen. “Benjamin Franklin: The Fusion of Science and Letters.” In American Literature and Science, edited by Robert Scholnick, 39-57. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.
Bertucci, Paola. “Sparks in the Dark: The Attraction of Electricity in the Eighteenth Century.” Endeavor 31, no. 3 (August 2007): 88-93.
Beaudreau, Sherry Ann, and Stanley Finger. "Medical electricity and madness in the 18th century: the legacies of Benjamin Franklin and Jan Ingenhousz." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 330-345.
Brands, H.W.. The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Chaplin, Joyce E. The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2006
Cohen, I. Bernard. Benjamin Franklin’s Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Cohen, I. Bernard. Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
Daston, Lorraine. “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment.” Science in Context 4 no. 2 (1990): 367-386.
Davids, Karel. “The Scholarly Atlantic: Circuits of Knowledge between Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Americas in the Eighteenth Century.” In Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, 224-248. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Delbourgo, James. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Finger, Stanley, and Franklin Zaromb. “Benjamin Franklin and Shock-Induced Amnesia.” American Psychologist 61 no. 3 (2006): 240–48.
Hindle, Brooke. The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. by University of North Carolina Press, 1956.
Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. “Technological Momentum.” In Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, 140-174. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Irving, Sarah. "Public knowledge, natural philosophy, and the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters." Early American Literature 49, no. 1 (2014): 67-88.
Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Lemay, J.A. Leo. Ebenezer Kinnersley, Franklin’s Friend. Philadelphia: Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, 1964.
Lynn, Michael R. Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Schaffer, Simon. “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 21, no. 1 (1983): 1-43.
Schiffer, Michael Brian. Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Stearns, Raymond Phineas. Science in the British Colonies of America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.
Warner, Michael. "Franklin and the Letters of the Republic." Representations, no. 16 (1986): 110-30.
Winterer, Caroline. “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 597-623.
Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
