Voiceover: Where we left off in the
last video, Benjamin Franklin was born.
He was the tenth son to a Puritan father in Boston.
He eventually ends up working for his brother
as an apprentice at age 12 but then runs away at 17.
Voiceover: Right, he runs away.
He had written the Silence Dogood Essays.
His brother had caught him writing
these essays under the pseudonym Silence Dogood
and Franklin didn't want to remain an apprentice,
even though he was bound to do so.
So he runs away in the nighttime.
He gets on a boat in Boston, sails, originally
to New York and, after a few days, decides to continue
on to Philadelphia, going up the Philadelphia Bay,
the Delaware Bay, and then into the river
and onto the Market Street Wharf of Philadelphia.
There's a famous scene of him arriving.
Voiceover: 17 years old, 19, 22.
Voiceover: 17 years old.
Bedraggled, wet, he has only a few coins in his pocket.
When he arrives at the wharf, he gives
one of the coins to the boatman as a tip.
When you're really poor, you don't want people to know
you're poor so you pretend to be a little bit richer.
There it is, Franklin already caring
about his public relations and caring about
sort of being a typical American.
Sort of saying, "I don't want to look poor.
"I'm going to be a generous guy."
In marching up Market Street, he buys three puffy rolls
and he's all wet and bedraggled.
He passes a doorway, there's a 15 year old girl
named Deborah Reed and she sort of laughs at him,
thinks he makes a ridiculous looking figure.
We know this because, years later, when he was
65 years old, he writes his autobiography and
there's this scene in it of him arriving in Philadelphia.
I think it's the best and, certainly the most famous,
scene in autobiographical literature,
which is Ben Franklin's arrival in Philadelphia.
You see him discussing his arrival and,
as you look at the manuscript of the autobiography,
he writes in the fact that his wife, who must have told him this later,
"Hey, I was laughing at you and thought
"you made a ridiculous figure."
Later on, Franklin writes in the third draft that he's doing
of the autobiography, "As I certainly did."
He's being sort of self aware and self deprecating but also
very proud, because here he's saying rags to riches.
I was in rags, I was bedraggled.
Even the person I ended up marrying was laughing at me,
and then I became a great success.
Voiceover: And pretty immediately he wants to marry her
but it doesn't work that way.
Voiceover: Right, he decides to propose marriage to her
Her father was a tradesman, a pretty successful merchant in Philadelphia
But Benjamin Franklin, first of all he's 17, and he was truly a 17 year old
Meaning, he may have been very wise and could write very well
but he had a lot of adventures, let us say.
And at one point he has to go to England to get the printing material.
The typesets, the printing presses, that he needs to become a printer.
Voiceover: He wants to become a printer
but he obviously needs equipment.
Voiceover: Right, he didn't have equipment
he was working for somebody else who was a printer
and he wanted to start up a rival print shop
and somebody said "I'll stake you,
I'll give you money, you go to London, you buy the press".
But the guy that was going to stake him ends up pulling out
Doesn't really stake him. Franklin arrives in London with no money.
So, he works for almost two years in London to make enough money
to buy the printing equipment.
While he's over there, first of all he's having a good time.
He has many girlfriends and maybe writing a letter every now and then
to his young friend Deborah back in Philadelphia.
But she ends up getting getting married, she doesn't wait for him.
And it's a real mess because she gets married,
Franklin comes back from London
and then her husband disappears.
So, she's not really divorced, but she's not
really single, and she's not really married.
And so they eventually enter into a Common-law marriage
because they couldn't get married
in the church because she was technically
still married. And he, as I said, was having fun
as a young 20 year old and he had his own
illegitimate child, a son named William.
But unlike a lot of people of that period
who had illegitimate children,
he immediately took responsibility.
He decides he's going to raise William himself.
And so, Deborah is not only willing to enter
into the Common-law marriage,
but also help raise his son, William Franklin.
Voiceover: So this pretty, especially for that period
in time, on both sides. She was
officially married in the eyes of the church.
That's why they had to get a purely legal marriage.
And he has an illegitimate child,
returns. This is in 1730, so he's still a
fairly young man and she's even younger.
He's 24 and she's 22 at this point.
Voiceover: Right, right. It was a somewhat
unconventional type of family.
Throughout his life he had that.
It's hard to know what to make of the
relationship between Deborah Reed,
who never, as far as we can tell,
and I've researched this a lot,
never left Philadelphia.
Probably never spent the night more than
four blocks from Market Street.
Where as you'll see from Franklin's life
he's in London, he's in Paris, he's in Boston,
he goes up and down the coast of America
during the postal system. And yet they have
a very friendly, even loving, relationship.
But not what we would call a normal,
conventional marriage.
Voiceover: Fascinating.
He's starting to establish himself now.
He comes back, he's got some money saved up.
He's got the equipment, and this is when
he really starts to establish himself as
the Benjamin Franklin most people remember.
Voiceover: Well he becomes one of our first
successful small business owners.
Soon it becomes a big business.
He has a print shop in Philadelphia.
If you have a print shop, you end up needing
some content to print in order to be good.
So he starts a newspaper, which
was the 'Pennsylvania Gazette'.
Unlike the other newspapers, there are
a lot of other newspapers in this small town,
maybe nine or ten of them.
But one of them is affiliated with the Anglicans.
Another is affiliated with the Quakers.
Another with the Proprietors, they were called.
The Penn Family, who owned most of the land.
Franklin decides to start an independent newspaper
with a spunky independent, very freedom-loving
American voice and he writes it with a lot
of pseudonyms again, in his newspaper.
Writes stories under different people's names,
including Polly Baker, a woman he invents
who tells a story of how she had
illegitimate children but raised them all.
So he gets into the politics of..
Voiceover: I love the social justice here
Voiceover: Social justice a bit,
but done with a real sense of humor
as Polly Baker is standing in front
of the court, saying "Hey, I'm doing
"good for this colony. And by the way,"
"some of you in the corner are the reason"
I have these illegitimate children."
(laughs)
So it's a very funny fictional piece,
it has a little social justice undercurrent.
The other thing he does, because he
wants a successful print shop, is he
needs books to print. And he realizes
printing the Bible is not really a smart idea.
People buy the Bible just once in their life,
maybe twice. He should print an almanack.
Because people buy an almanack every year.
So in 1733 he starts what's called
'Poor Richard's Almanack'.
Voiceover: Just to take a step back here.
I remember almanacks and I'm assuming
they are still printed. But, I would
guess some of the younger listeners
to this will have no idea what an almanack is.
Voiceover: Imagine the World Wide Web
but in a pocketbook form.
It came out every year, it told you the
population of every city.
It predicted the weather. It told
you what the weather was like the year before.
It gave you the horoscopes and the way
the moon phases and the sun rises would be.
But it also had wonderful little lessons.
It told you how to remove stains from fabrics.
When Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web
He says it's because he remembered an almanack
an almanack of the same period as Ben Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanack that was called
Inquire Within Upon Everything.
So the first name for the web was Inquire.
It was a system written to be an almanack
but do it electronically.
Voiceover: Why is it not called 'Ben Franklin's Almanack'?
Voiceover: Ben Franklin very often, as I've said,
wrote under a pseudonym. Sometimes he
did it to disguise and be anonymous,
just like we invent pseudonyms when we are
on Twitter or something.
On the other hand, everybody knew who
Poor Richard was. It was sold at Ben
Franklin's print shop.
Everybody knew he was Poor Richard Saunders.
But it gave him a way to poke fun, be humorous.
Poor Richard Saunders even pokes fun at his
printer, meaning poke fun at Ben Franklin.
Saying he has all these rattling traps and
needs to make money out of them, so he's using
me to make money, that sort of thing.
And we even get some of the famous old maxims
because Franklin liked to put in the margin
of his almanack 'Poor Richard's Sayings'.
And you may remember some of them.
"A penny saved is a penny earned."
"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."
And there were about 150 of these over the
years that become quite famous, some of which
he adopted from other people's writings.
But, he just knew how to make them clever and pithy.
And becomes the most successful almanack
ever printed in America.
Thousands and thousands of copies, so he
ends up franchising other people in other cities
to create print shops, to do Poor Richard's Almanack.
One of the coolest things he does, as a media guy
he has printing press, he has the content,
he decides he needs a distribution system.
So he helps create the American Colonial Postal System
to tie together all of his print shops
and send the newspapers back and forth.
And to help the printing businesses of all of
his friends and apprentices and relatives
up and down the coast of the colonies
be tied together.
Voiceover: This is no small thing.
You're saying he's constructing the postal system.
Voiceover: The US Colonial Postal System is
primarily brought together by Benjamin Franklin
as a printer in Philadelphia in order to
tie together the various printing shops
in the colonies that were usually run by his
friends and relatives, and to distribute
the content, like Poor Richard's Almanack.
Voiceover: Fascinating.