Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and did you
know that before Ben Franklin was on money, he printed money? He started his career as
a printer and went on to own a press that made all the money for colonial Delaware and
Pennsylvania.
He also had a strange method for deterring counterfeiters: He spelled “Pennsylvania”
incorrectly on all of his money. That way, when counterfeiters copied the bills, they
thought they were working from a fake version and would correct the spelling, and then Franklin
could catch them.
Those are just two of the many amazing facts about the American Founding Fathers that I’m
going to share with you today in this video presented by our friends at History.
So everyone knows about Paul Revere’s famous ride, but did you know it included a monumental
DUI? In order to get to Lexington to warn of the impending British invasion, Revere
had to travel through Medford, the rum capital of America. He stopped long enough to get
suitably drunk. And then the stealthy ride that Revere had intended turned into a loud
and drunken rampage. In fact, he was so rowdy that patrolling Redcoats detained him for
an hour before letting him go. Of course, by then he had made enough of a racket to
let everyone know that trouble was brewing.
And speaking of brewing, one of the men Revere was on a mission to find and alert was Samuel
Adams, who worked in his father’s malt house as a maltster.
His name is now synonymous with the beer, of course, but that’s not really Sam Adams’
face on the label. Poor Samuel wasn’t known for his good looks, so a rumor spread that
the Boston brewery used handsomer Paul Revere’s portrait for their logo. But technically it
IS a picture of Sam Adams, just a very flattering one. Like, multiple Instagram filters.
The other person Revere was trying to track down during his drunken ride was John Hancock,
best known for his, you know, "John Hancock" - his huge and ornate signature. But his signature
on the Declaration of Independence was actually kept secret for months after the signing,
because all of the signatures were, out of fear for the signers safety.
Hancock’s successor as the President of the Continental Congress was South Carolina’s
Henry Laurens, a man who serves as an example of why the term “founding fathers” shouldn’t
be synonymous with “great people.” For one thing, Laurens got rich and powerful because
he was a partner in North America’s largest slave-trading house.
After Laurens, John Jay became president of the Continental Congress, and he was a strong
opponent of slavery. He actually introduced legislation to abolish slavery in New York
as early as 1777.
Jay was in fact so popular that he was nominated and elected into office twice -- without his
knowledge. The first time was in 1784, when he returned from Europe after negotiating
the Treaty of Paris. And upon coming home, found out that Congress had named him Secretary
of Foreign Affairs, a job that he would come to hate.
Later, while Jay was serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1794,
President George Washington sent him to London to negotiate yet another peace treaty. And
when Jay came back from that trip, he found that he had been elected Governor of New York.
Surprise!
Speaking of surprises, you may be shocked to hear that Ben Franklin was an expert swimmer.
Is there anything he wasn't good at? As a child, he loved swimming in Philadelphia’s
Schuylkill River and went on to consider opening schools for young runners and swimmers before
going on to do, you know, essentially everything else.
And to be a proper polymath you must of course sleep very little. Franklin reportedly awoke
at 5 in the morning every day and didn’t go to bed until 1am.
That said, Ben Franklin was a big fan of convenience, and even laziness. Like, for instance, he
invented a mechanical arm to retrieve shelved books and a system where he could unlock his
door from bed by activating a pulley.
Benjamin Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was also a physician,
today known as the first doctor to believe that mental illness was a disease and not
something to be blamed on demons.
As the so called “Father of American Psychiatry,” Dr. Rush paved the way for the humane treatment
of the mentally ill— but not all of his treatments would be considered “humane”
by today’s standards. For instance, he was a strong believer in blood purging -- although
back then who wasn't? And he also strapped some of his patients to spinning boards to
force their blood flow outwards.
He also invented the “Tranquilizing Chair”— a device that seems like it would be the opposite
of tranquilizing. To achieve “tranquilization,” the patient would be strapped into a seat
and immobilized before having a box placed on their head to deprive their senses.
Boy, would I rather vacation on the beach or in the tranquilizing box? I can't decide.
Anyway, Rush was friends with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and knew them well during
their famous and heated feuds. One night, the doctor had a dream about his friends in
which they reconciled their differences. He wrote Adams and Jefferson to tell them all
about it, and his dream became a self-fulfilling prophesy as the two statesmen reached out
to talk to each other about it and wound up renewing their friendship. And then they died
on the same day, it's very cute.
Not only was it the same day, Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, exactly 50 years
after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Adams and Jefferson were also linked by their shared love of pets. Jefferson had two pet
grizzly bear cubs and Adams had a dog named Satan.
Now Satan is a weird name for a dog, but George Washington might take the cake when it comes
to our founding fathers’ pet-naming skills. Three of our first president’s dogs were
named Drunkard, Mopsey, and Sweetlips.
Alright, I hereby christen you Mopsey, you're Sweetlips. Elephant, you're Drunkard.
I will remind you, these are the dudes that we are still looking up to 230 years later.
We're still like, "but what would the owner of Sweetlips say about this?"
Ben Franklin’s fellow founding fathers didn’t want him to draft the Declaration of Independence
because they were worried he might try to sneak a joke into it.
They clearly were familiar with his work, like the time that he wrote the Royal Academy
asking them to find a way to make his farts stop smelling.
Franklin liked that letter enough to sign it under his own name, but he wrote many essays,
books, and more under a whole slew of pseudonyms. They including Richard Saunders, Silence Dogood,
Anthony Afterwit, Polly Baker, Alice Addertongue, Busy Body, Benevolous, Caelia Shortface and
Martha Careful.
The last two were used by Franklin to make fun of Samuel Keimer, his former employer
whom he accused of stealing his ideas. Ben Franklin was many things -- brilliant,
ambitious, incredibly hardworking, astonishingly petty.
But he also coined many of the electricity-related terms we use today, including “battery,”
“conductor,” and “electrician.”
And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that Ben Franklin was also prolific when
it came to alcohol. In 1737, Franklin published a list of over 200 synonyms for “getting
drunk.”
Thanks for watching Mental Floss on YouTube, which is made with the help of all these nice
people and was made possible by our friends at History. Be sure to check out their new
series, Sons of Liberty. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.