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Who Was Benjamin Franklin?

Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War.

His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. A writer known for his wit and wisdom, Franklin also published Poor Richard's Almanack, invented bifocal glasses and organized the first successful American lending library.

Early Life

Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Franklin's father, English-born soap and candlemaker Josiah Franklin, had seven children with first wife, Anne Child, and 10 more with second wife, Abiah Folger. Franklin was his 15th child and youngest son.

Franklin learned to read at an early age, and despite his success at the Boston Latin School, he stopped his formal schooling at 10 to work full-time in his cash-strapped father's candle and soap shop. Dipping wax and cutting wicks didn't fire the young boy's imagination, however.

Perhaps to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his other sons had done, Josiah apprenticed 12-year-old Franklin at the print shop run by his older brother James.

Although James mistreated and frequently beat his younger brother, Franklin learned a great deal about newspaper publishing and adopted a similar brand of subversive politics under the printer's tutelage.

Silence Dogood

When James refused to publish any of his brother's writing, 16-year-old Franklin adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood, and "her" 14 imaginative and witty letters delighted readers of his brother's newspaper, The New England Courant. James grew angry, however, when he learned that his apprentice had penned the letters.

Tired of his brother's "harsh and tyrannical" behavior, Franklin fled Boston in 1723 although he had three years remaining on a legally binding contract with his master.

He escaped to New York before settling in Philadelphia and began working with another printer. Philadelphia became his home base for the rest of his life.

Living in London

Encouraged by Pennsylvania Governor William Keith to set up his own print shop, Franklin left for London in 1724 to purchase supplies from stationers, booksellers and printers. When the teenager arrived in England, however, he felt duped when Keith's letters of introduction never arrived as promised.

Although forced to find work at London's print shops, Franklin took full advantage of the city's pleasures-attending theater performances, mingling with the locals in coffee houses and continuing his lifelong passion for reading.

A self-taught swimmer who crafted his own wooden flippers, Franklin performed long-distance swims on the Thames River. (In 1968, he was inducted as an honorary member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.)

In 1725 Franklin published his first pamphlet, "A Dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," which argued that humans lack free will and, thus, are not morally responsible for their actions. (Franklin later repudiated this thought and burned all but one copy of the pamphlet still in his possession.)

Wife and Children

In 1723, after Franklin moved from Boston to Philadelphia, he lodged at the home of John Read, where he met and courted his landlord's daughter Deborah.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, he discovered that Deborah had married in the interim, only to be abandoned by her husband just months after the wedding.

The future Founding Father rekindled his romance with Deborah Read and he took her as his common-law wife in 1730. Around that time, Franklin fathered a son, William, out of wedlock who was taken in by the couple. The pair's first son, Francis, was born in 1732, but he died four years later of smallpox. The couple's only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743.

The two times Franklin moved to London, in 1757 and again in 1764, it was without Deborah, who refused to leave Philadelphia. His second stay was the last time the couple saw each other. Franklin would not return home before Deborah passed away in 1774 from a stroke at the age of 66.

In 1762, Franklin's son William took office as New Jersey's royal governor, a position his father arranged through his political connections in the British government. Franklin's later support for the patriot cause put him at odds with his loyalist son. When the New Jersey militia stripped William Franklin of his post as royal governor and imprisoned him in 1776, his father chose not to intercede on his behalf.

Life in Philadelphia

After his return to Philadelphia in 1726, Franklin held varied jobs including bookkeeper, shopkeeper and currency cutter. In 1728 he returned to a familiar trade - printing paper currency - in New Jersey before partnering with a friend to open his own print shop in Philadelphia that published government pamphlets and books.

In 1730 Franklin was named the official printer of Pennsylvania. By that time, he had formed the "Junto," a social and self-improvement study group for young men that met every Friday to debate morality, philosophy and politics.

When Junto members sought to expand their reading choices, Franklin helped to incorporate America's first subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 1731.

In 1729 Franklin published another pamphlet, "A Modest Enquiry into The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency," which advocated for an increase in the money supply to stimulate the economy.

With the cash Franklin earned from his money-related treatise, he was able to purchase The Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper from a former boss. Under his ownership, the struggling newspaper was transformed into the most widely-read paper in the colonies and became one of the first to turn a profit.

He had less luck in 1732 when he launched the first German-language newspaper in the colonies, the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung. Nonetheless, Franklin's prominence and success grew during the 1730s.

Franklin amassed real estate and businesses and organized the volunteer Union Fire Company to counteract dangerous fire hazards in Philadelphia. He joined the Freemasons in 1731 and was eventually elected grand master of the Masons of Pennsylvania.

Poor Richard's Almanack

At the end of 1732, Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanack.

In addition to weather forecasts, astronomical information and poetry, the almanac-which Franklin published for 25 consecutive years-included proverbs and Franklin's witty maxims such as "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" and "He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas."

Scientist and Inventor

In the 1740s, Franklin expanded into science and entrepreneurship. His 1743 pamphlet "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge" underscored his interests and served as the founding document of the American Philosophical Society, the first scientific society in the colonies.

By 1748, the 42-year-old Franklin had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania, and he became a soldier in the Pennsylvania militia. He turned his printing business over to a partner to give himself more time to conduct scientific experiments. He moved into a new house in 1748.

Inventions

Franklin was a prolific inventor and scientist who was responsible for the following inventions:

Franklin stove: Franklin's first invention, created around 1740, provided more heat with less fuel.

Bifocals: Anyone tired of switching between two pairs of glasses understands why Franklin developed bifocals that could be used for both distance and reading.

Armonica:Franklin's inventions took on a musical bent when, in 1761, he commenced development on the armonica, a musical instrument composed of spinning glass bowls on a shaft. Both Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed music for the strange instrument.

Rocking chair

Flexible catheter

American penny

Franklin also discovered the Gulf Stream after his return trip across the Atlantic Ocean from London in 1775. He began to speculate about why the westbound trip always took longer, and his measurements of ocean temperatures led to his discovery of the existence of the Gulf Stream. This knowledge served to cut two weeks off the previous sailing time from Europe to North America.

Franklin even devised a new "scheme" for the alphabet that proposed to eliminate the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y as redundant.

Franklin's self-education earned him honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, England's University of Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In 1749, Franklin wrote a pamphlet concerning the education of youth in Pennsylvania that resulted in the establishment of the Academy of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania.

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Electricity

In 1752, Franklin conducted the famous kite-and-key experiment to demonstrate that lightning was electricity and soon after invented the lightning rod.

His investigations into electrical phenomena were compiled into "Experiments and Observations on Electricity," published in England in 1751. He coined new electricity-related terms that are still part of the lexicon, such as battery, charge, conductor and electrify.

Slavery

In 1748, Franklin acquired the first of several slaves to work in his new home and in the print shop. Franklin's views on slavery evolved over the following decades to the point that he considered the institution inherently evil, and thus, he freed his slaves in the 1760s.

Later in life, he became more vociferous in his opposition to slavery. Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and wrote many tracts urging the abolition of slavery. In 1790 he petitioned the U.S. Congress to end slavery and the slave trade.

Election to the Government

Franklin became a member of Philadelphia's city council in 1748 and a justice of the peace the following year. In 1751, he was elected a Philadelphia alderman and a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly, a position to which he was re-elected annually until 1764. Two years later, he accepted a royal appointment as deputy postmaster general of North America.

When the French and Indian War began in 1754, Franklin called on the colonies to band together for their common defense, which he dramatized in The Pennsylvania Gazette with a cartoon of a snake cut into sections with the caption "Join or Die."

He represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies. Franklin's "Plan of Union," however, failed to be ratified by the colonies.

In 1757 Franklin was appointed by the Pennsylvania Assembly to serve as the colony's agent in England. Franklin sailed to London to negotiate a long-standing dispute with the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, taking William and his two slaves but leaving behind Deborah and Sarah.

He spent much of the next two decades in London, where he was drawn to the high society and intellectual salons of the cosmopolitan city.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, he toured the colonies to inspect its post offices.

Stamp Act and Declaration of Independence

After Franklin lost his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764, he returned to London as the colony's agent. Franklin returned at a tense time in Great Britain's relations with the American colonies.

The British Parliament's passage of the Stamp Act in March 1765 imposed a highly unpopular tax on all printed materials for commercial and legal use in the American colonies. Since Franklin purchased stamps for his printing business and nominated a friend as the Pennsylvania stamp distributor, some colonists thought Franklin implicitly supported the new tax, and rioters in Philadelphia even threatened his house.

Franklin's passionate denunciation of the tax in testimony before Parliament, however, contributed to the Stamp Act's repeal in 1766.

Two years later he penned a pamphlet, "Causes of the American Discontents before 1768," and he soon became an agent for Massachusetts, Georgia and New Jersey as well. Franklin fanned the flames of revolution by sending the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson to America.

The letters called for the restriction of the rights of colonists, which caused a firestorm after their publication by Boston newspapers. In the wake of the scandal, Franklin was removed as deputy postmaster general, and he returned to North America in 1775 as a devotee of the patriot cause.

In 1775, Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress and appointed the first postmaster general for the colonies. In 1776, he was appointed commissioner to Canada and was one of five men to draft the Declaration of Independence.

Life in Paris

After voting for independence in 1776, Franklin was elected commissioner to France, making him essentially the first U.S. ambassador to France. He set sail to negotiate a treaty for the country's military and financial support.

Much has been made of Franklin's years in Paris, chiefly his rich romantic life in his nine years abroad after Deborah's death. At the age of 74, he even proposed marriage to a widow named Madame Helvetius, but she rejected him.

Franklin was embraced in France as much, if not more, for his wit and intellectual standing in the scientific community as for his status as a political appointee from a fledgling country.

His reputation facilitated respect and entrees into closed communities, including the court of King Louis XVI. And it was his adept diplomacy that led to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War. After almost a decade in France, Franklin returned to the United States in 1785.

Drafting the U.S. Constitution

Franklin was elected in 1787 to represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, which drafted and ratified the new U.S. Constitution.

The oldest delegate at the age of 81, Franklin initially supported proportional representation in Congress, but he fashioned the Great Compromise that resulted in proportional representation in the House of Representatives and equal representation by state in the Senate. In 1787, he helped found the Society for Political Inquiries, dedicated to improving knowledge of government.

Franklin was never elected president of the United States. However, he played an important role as one of eight Founding Fathers, helping draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

He also served several roles in the government: He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly and appointed as the first postmaster general for the colonies as well as diplomat to France. He was a true polymath and entrepreneur, which is no doubt why he is often called the "First American."

Death

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the home of his daughter, Sarah Bache. He was 84, suffered from gout and had complained of ailments for some time, completing the final codicil to his will a little more than a year and a half prior to his death.

He bequeathed most of his estate to Sarah and very little to his son William, whose opposition to the patriot cause still stung him. He also donated money that funded scholarships, schools and museums in Boston and Philadelphia.

Franklin had actually written his epitaph when he was 22: "The body of B. Franklin, Printer (Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents torn Out And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be Lost; For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author."

In the end, however, the stone on the grave he shared with his wife in the cemetery of Philadelphia's Christ Church reads simply, "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790."

Accomplishments

The image of Franklin that has come down through history, along with his likeness on the $100 bill, is something of a caricature-a bald man in a frock coat holding a kite string with a key attached. But the scope of things he applied himself to was so broad it seems a shame.

Founding universities and libraries, the post office, shaping the foreign policy of the fledgling United States, helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, publishing newspapers, warming us with the Franklin stove, pioneering advances in science, letting us see with bifocals and lighting our way with electricity-all from a man who never finished school but shaped his life through abundant reading and experience, a strong moral compass and an unflagging commitment to civic duty. Franklin illuminated corners of American life that still have the lingering glow of his attention.
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Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking.

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Early Life & Family

Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. Einstein grew up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a Munich-based company that mass-produced electrical equipment.

Einstein's mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Einstein had one sister, Maja, born two years after him.

Einstein attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. However, he felt alienated there and struggled with the institution's rigid pedagogical style.

He also had what were considered speech challenges, though he developed a passion for classical music and playing the violin, which would stay with him into his later years. Most significantly, Einstein's youth was marked by deep inquisitiveness and inquiry.

Towards the end of the 1880s, Max Talmud, a Polish medical student who sometimes dined with the Einstein family, became an informal tutor to young Einstein. Talmud had introduced his pupil to a children's science text that inspired Einstein to dream about the nature of light.

Thus, during his teens, Einstein penned what would be seen as his first major paper, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields."

Hermann Einstein relocated the family to Milan, Italy, in the mid-1890s after his business lost out on a major contract. Einstein was left at a relative's boarding house in Munich to complete his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium.

Faced with military duty when he turned of age, Einstein allegedly withdrew from classes, using a doctor's note to excuse himself and claim nervous exhaustion. With their son rejoining them in Italy, his parents understood Einstein's perspective but were concerned about his future prospects as a school dropout and draft dodger.

Education

Einstein was eventually able to gain admission into the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, specifically due to his superb mathematics and physics scores on the entrance exam.

He was still required to complete his pre-university education first, and thus attended a high school in Aarau, Switzerland helmed by Jost Winteler. Einstein lived with the schoolmaster's family and fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. Einstein later renounced his German citizenship and became a Swiss citizen at the dawn of the new century.

Patent Clerk

After graduating, Einstein faced major challenges in terms of finding academic positions, having alienated some professors over not attending class more regularly in lieu of studying independently.

Einstein eventually found steady work in 1902 after receiving a referral for a clerk position in a Swiss patent office. While working at the patent office, Einstein had the time to further explore ideas that had taken hold during his studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and thus cemented his theorems on what would be known as the principle of relativity.

In 1905-seen by many as a "miracle year" for the theorist-Einstein had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik, one of the best-known physics journals of the era. Two focused on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. The two others, which outlined E=MC2 and the special theory of relativity, were defining for Einstein's career and the course of the study of physics.

Wife and Children

Einstein married Mileva Maric on Jan. 6, 1903. While attending school in Zurich, Einstein met Maric, a Serbian physics student. Einstein continued to grow closer to Maric, but his parents were strongly against the relationship due to her ethnic background.

Nonetheless, Einstein continued to see her, with the two developing a correspondence via letters in which he expressed many of his scientific ideas. Einstein's father passed away in 1902, and the couple married shortly thereafter.

That same year the couple had a daughter, Lieserl, who might have been later raised by Maric's relatives or given up for adoption. Her ultimate fate and whereabouts remain a mystery.

The couple had two sons, Hans Albert Einstein (who became a well-known hydraulic engineer) and Eduard "Tete" Einstein (who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man).

The Einsteins' marriage would not be a happy one, with the two divorcing in 1919 and Maric having an emotional breakdown in connection to the split. Einstein, as part of a settlement, agreed to give Maric any funds he might receive from possibly winning the Nobel Prize in the future.

During his marriage to Maric, Einstein had also begun an affair some time earlier with a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. The couple wed in 1919, the same year of Einstein's divorce.

He would continue to see other women throughout his second marriage, which ended with Löwenthal's death in 1936.

Nobel Prize for Physics

In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, since his ideas on relativity were still considered questionable. He wasn't actually given the award until the following year due to a bureaucratic ruling, and during his acceptance speech, he still opted to speak about relativity.

In the development of his general theory, Einstein had held onto the belief that the universe was a fixed, static entity, aka a "cosmological constant," though his later theories directly contradicted this idea and asserted that the universe could be in a state of flux.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble deduced that we indeed inhabit an expanding universe, with the two scientists meeting at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles in 1931.

Inventions and Discoveries

As a physicist, Einstein had many discoveries, but he is perhaps best known for his theory of relativity and the equation E=MC2, which foreshadowed the development of atomic power and the atomic bomb.

Theory of Relativity

Einstein first proposed a special theory of relativity in 1905 in his paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," taking physics in an electrifying new direction. By November 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity. Einstein considered this theory the culmination of his life research.

He was convinced of the merits of general relativity because it allowed for a more accurate prediction of planetary orbits around the sun, which fell short in Isaac Newton 's theory, and for a more expansive, nuanced explanation of how gravitational forces worked.

Einstein's assertions were affirmed via observations and measurements by British astronomers Sir Frank Dyson and Sir Arthur Eddington during the 1919 solar eclipse, and thus a global science icon was born.

Einstein's E=MC2

Einstein's 1905 paper on the matter/energy relationship proposed the equation E=MC2: the energy of a body (E) is equal to the mass (M) of that body times the speed of light squared (C2). This equation suggested that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy, a discovery that heralded atomic power.

Famed quantum theorist Max Planck backed up the assertions of Einstein, who thus became a star of the lecture circuit and academia, taking on various positions before becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (today is known as the Max Planck Institute for Physics) from 1917 to 1933.

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Travel Diaries

In 2018, readers were allowed a glimpse into some of the unfiltered private thoughts of Einstein as a young man with the publication of The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923.

The young scientist started a sea journey to Japan in Marseilles, France, in autumn of 1922, accompanied by his second wife Elsa. They journeyed through the Suez Canal, then to Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Japan. The couple returned to Germany via Palestine and Spain in March 1923.

The Travel Diaries contained unflattering analyses of the people he came across, including the Chinese and Sri Lankans, a surprise coming from a man known for vehemently denouncing racism in his later years.

In an entry for November 1922, Einstein refers to residents of Hong Kong as "industrious, filthy, lethargic people ... Even the children are spiritless and look lethargic. It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races."

Becoming a U.S. Citizen

In 1933, Einstein took on a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. At the time the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, were gaining prominence with violent propaganda and vitriol in an impoverished post- World War I Germany.

The Nazi Party influenced other scientists to label Einstein's work "Jewish physics." Jewish citizens were barred from university work and other official jobs, and Einstein himself was targeted to be killed. Meanwhile, other European scientists also left regions threatened by Germany and immigrated to the U.S., with concern over Nazi strategies to create an atomic weapon.

After moving, Einstein never went back to his native land. It was at Princeton that Einstein would spend the rest of his life working on a unified field theory-an all-embracing paradigm meant to unify the varied laws of physics.

Not long after he began his career at Princeton, Einstein expressed an appreciation for American "meritocracy" and the opportunities people had for free thought, a stark contrast to his own experiences coming of age.

In 1935, Einstein was granted permanent residency in his adopted country and became an American citizen five years later. During World War II, he worked on Navy-based weapons systems and made big monetary donations to the military by auctioning off manuscripts worth millions.

Einstein and the Atomic Bomb

In 1939, Einstein and fellow physicist Leo Szilard wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb and to galvanize the United States to create its own nuclear weapons.

The U.S. would eventually initiate the Manhattan Project, though Einstein would not take a direct part in its implementation due to his pacifist and socialist affiliations. Einstein was also the recipient of much scrutiny and major distrust from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

After learning of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, Einstein became a major player in efforts to curtail usage of the a-bomb. The following year he and Szilard founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and in 1947, via an essay for The Atlantic Monthly, Einstein espoused working with the United Nations to maintain nuclear weapons as a deterrent to conflict.

Member of the NAACP

In the late 1940s, Einstein became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), seeing the parallels between the treatment of Jews in Germany and African Americans in the United States.

He corresponded with scholar/activist W.E.B. Du Bois as well as performing artist Paul Robeson and campaigned for civil rights, calling racism a "disease" in a 1946 Lincoln University speech.

Time Travel and Quantum Theory

After World War II, Einstein continued to work on his unified field theory and key aspects of his general theory of relativity, including time travel, wormholes, black holes, and the origins of the universe.

However, he felt isolated in his endeavors since the majority of his colleagues had begun focusing their attention on quantum theory. In the last decade of his life, Einstein, who had always seen himself as a loner, withdrew even further from any sort of spotlight, preferring to stay close to Princeton and immerse himself in processing ideas with colleagues.

Death

Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76 at the University Medical Center at Princeton. The previous day, while working on a speech to honor Israel's seventh anniversary, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

He was taken to the hospital for treatment but refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate. "I want to go when I want," he stated at the time. "It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly."

Einstein's Brain

During Einstein's autopsy, pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed his brain, reportedly without his family's consent, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience.

However, during his life, Einstein participated in brain studies, and at least one biography claimed he hoped researchers would study his brain after he died. Einstein's brain is now located at the Princeton University Medical Center. In keeping with his wishes, the rest of his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a secret location.

In 1999, Canadian scientists who were studying Einstein's brain found that his inferior parietal lobe, the area that processes spatial relationships, 3D-visualization and mathematical thought, was 15 percent wider than in people who possess normal intelligence. According to The New York Times, the researchers believe it may help explain why Einstein was so intelligent.

Legacy

Since Einstein's death, a veritable mountain of books have been written on the iconic thinker's life, including Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson and Einstein: A Biography by Jürgen Neffe, both from 2007. Einstein's own words are presented in the collection The World As I See It.

In 2018, a team of scientists confirmed one aspect of Einstein's general theory of relativity, that the light from a star passing close to a black hole would be stretched to longer wavelengths by the overwhelming gravitational field.

Tracking star S2, their measurements indicated that the star's orbital velocity increased to over 25 million kph as it neared the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, its appearance shifting from blue to red as its wavelengths stretched to escape the pull of gravity.
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Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. Einstein grew up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a Munich-based company that mass-produced electrical equipment.

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Who Was Isaac Newton?

Isaac Newton was a physicist and mathematician who developed the principles of modern physics, including the laws of motion and is credited as one of the great minds of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution.

In 1687, he published his most acclaimed work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which has been called the single most influential book on physics. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England, making him Sir Isaac Newton.

Early Life and Family

Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Using the "old" Julian calendar, Newton's birth date is sometimes displayed as December 25, 1642.

Newton was the only son of a prosperous local farmer, also named Isaac, who died three months before he was born. A premature baby born tiny and weak, Newton was not expected to survive.

When he was 3 years old, his mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton, remarried a well-to-do minister, Barnabas Smith, and went to live with him, leaving young Newton with his maternal grandmother.

The experience left an indelible imprint on Newton, later manifesting itself as an acute sense of insecurity. He anxiously obsessed over his published work, defending its merits with irrational behavior.

At age 12, Newton was reunited with his mother after her second husband died. She brought along her three small children from her second marriage.

Isaac Newton's Education

Newton was enrolled at the King's School in Grantham, a town in Lincolnshire, where he lodged with a local apothecary and was introduced to the fascinating world of chemistry.

His mother pulled him out of school at age 12. Her plan was to make him a farmer and have him tend the farm. Newton failed miserably, as he found farming monotonous. Newton was soon sent back to King's School to finish his basic education.

Perhaps sensing the young man's innate intellectual abilities, his uncle, a graduate of the University of Cambridge's Trinity College, persuaded Newton's mother to have him enter the university. Newton enrolled in a program similar to a work-study in 1661, and subsequently waited on tables and took care of wealthier students' rooms.

Scientific Revolution

When Newton arrived at Cambridge, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was already in full force. The heliocentric view of the universe-theorized by astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and later refined by Galileo -was well known in most European academic circles.

Philosopher René Descartes had begun to formulate a new concept of nature as an intricate, impersonal and inert machine. Yet, like most universities in Europe, Cambridge was steeped in Aristotelian philosophy and a view of nature resting on a geocentric view of the universe, dealing with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.

During his first three years at Cambridge, Newton was taught the standard curriculum but was fascinated with the more advanced science. All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers. The result was a less-than-stellar performance, but one that is understandable, given his dual course of study.

It was during this time that Newton kept a second set of notes, entitled "Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae" ("Certain Philosophical Questions"). The "Quaestiones" reveal that Newton had discovered the new concept of nature that provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution. Though Newton graduated without honors or distinctions, his efforts won him the title of scholar and four years of financial support for future education.

In 1665, the bubonic plague that was ravaging Europe had come to Cambridge, forcing the university to close. After a two-year hiatus, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow at Trinity College, as he was still not considered a standout scholar.

In the ensuing years, his fortune improved. Newton received his Master of Arts degree in 1669, before he was 27. During this time, he came across Nicholas Mercator's published book on methods for dealing with infinite series.

Newton quickly wrote a treatise, De Analysi, expounding his own wider-ranging results. He shared this with friend and mentor Isaac Barrow, but didn't include his name as author.

In June 1669, Barrow shared the unaccredited manuscript with British mathematician John Collins. In August 1669, Barrow identified its author to Collins as "Mr. Newton ... very young ... but of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things."

Newton's work was brought to the attention of the mathematics community for the first time. Shortly afterward, Barrow resigned his Lucasian professorship at Cambridge, and Newton assumed the chair.

Isaac Newton's Discoveries

Newton made discoveries in optics, motion and mathematics. Newton theorized that white light was a composite of all colors of the spectrum, and that light was composed of particles.

His momentous book on physics, Principia, contains information on nearly all of the essential concepts of physics except energy, ultimately helping him to explain the laws of motion and the theory of gravity. Along with mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Newton is credited for developing essential theories of calculus.

Isaac Newton Inventions

Newton's first major public scientific achievement was designing and constructing a reflecting telescope in 1668. As a professor at Cambridge, Newton was required to deliver an annual course of lectures and chose optics as his initial topic. He used his telescope to study optics and help prove his theory of light and color.

The Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope in 1671, and the organization's interest encouraged Newton to publish his notes on light, optics and color in 1672. These notes were later published as part of Newton's Opticks: Or, A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light.

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The Apple Myth

Between 1665 and 1667, Newton returned home from Trinity College to pursue his private study, as school was closed due to the Great Plague. Legend has it that, at this time, Newton experienced his famous inspiration of gravity with the falling apple. According to this common myth, Newton was sitting under an apple tree when a fruit fell and hit him on the head, inspiring him to suddenly come up with the theory of gravity.

While there is no evidence that the apple actually hit Newton on the head, he did see an apple fall from a tree, leading him to wonder why it fell straight down and not at an angle. Consequently, he began exploring the theories of motion and gravity.

It was during this 18-month hiatus as a student that Newton conceived many of his most important insights-including the method of infinitesimal calculus, the foundations for his theory of light and color, and the laws of planetary motion-that eventually led to the publication of his physics book Principia and his theory of gravity.

'Principia' and Newton's 3 Laws of Motion

In 1687, following 18 months of intense and effectively nonstop work, Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), most often known as Principia.

Principia is said to be the single most influential book on physics and possibly all of science. Its publication immediately raised Newton to international prominence.

Principia offers an exact quantitative description of bodies in motion, with three basic but important laws of motion:

First Law

A stationary body will stay stationary unless an external force is applied to it.

Second Law

Force is equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion (i.e., change in speed) is proportional to the force applied.

Third Law

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton and the Theory of Gravity

Newton's three basic laws of motion outlined in Principia helped him arrive at his theory of gravity. Newton's law of universal gravitation states that two objects attract each other with a force of gravitational attraction that's proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.

These laws helped explain not only elliptical planetary orbits but nearly every other motion in the universe: how the planets are kept in orbit by the pull of the sun's gravity; how the moon revolves around Earth and the moons of Jupiter revolve around it; and how comets revolve in elliptical orbits around the sun.

They also allowed him to calculate the mass of each planet, calculate the flattening of the Earth at the poles and the bulge at the equator, and how the gravitational pull of the sun and moon create the Earth's tides. In Newton's account, gravity kept the universe balanced, made it work, and brought heaven and Earth together in one great equation.

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Isaac Newton & Robert Hooke

Not everyone at the Royal Academy was enthusiastic about Newton's discoveries in optics and 1672 publication of Opticks: Or, A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. Among the dissenters was Robert Hooke, one of the original members of the Royal Academy and a scientist who was accomplished in a number of areas, including mechanics and optics.

While Newton theorized that light was composed of particles, Hooke believed it was composed of waves. Hooke quickly condemned Newton's paper in condescending terms, and attacked Newton's methodology and conclusions.

Hooke was not the only one to question Newton's work in optics. Renowned Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and a number of French Jesuits also raised objections. But because of Hooke's association with the Royal Society and his own work in optics, his criticism stung Newton the worst.

Unable to handle the critique, he went into a rage-a reaction to criticism that was to continue throughout his life. Newton denied Hooke's charge that his theories had any shortcomings and argued the importance of his discoveries to all of science.

In the ensuing months, the exchange between the two men grew more acrimonious, and soon Newton threatened to quit the Royal Society altogether. He remained only when several other members assured him that the Fellows held him in high esteem.

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The rivalry between Newton and Hooke would continue for several years thereafter. Then, in 1678, Newton suffered a complete nervous breakdown and the correspondence abruptly ended. The death of his mother the following year caused him to become even more isolated, and for six years he withdrew from intellectual exchange except when others initiated correspondence, which he always kept short.

During his hiatus from public life, Newton returned to his study of gravitation and its effects on the orbits of planets. Ironically, the impetus that put Newton on the right direction in this study came from Robert Hooke.

In a 1679 letter of general correspondence to Royal Society members for contributions, Hooke wrote to Newton and brought up the question of planetary motion, suggesting that a formula involving the inverse squares might explain the attraction between planets and the shape of their orbits.

Subsequent exchanges transpired before Newton quickly broke off the correspondence once again. But Hooke's idea was soon incorporated into Newton's work on planetary motion, and from his notes it appears he had quickly drawn his own conclusions by 1680, though he kept his discoveries to himself.

In early 1684, in a conversation with fellow Royal Society members Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, Hooke made his case on the proof for planetary motion. Both Wren and Halley thought he was on to something, but pointed out that a mathematical demonstration was needed.

In August 1684, Halley traveled to Cambridge to visit with Newton, who was coming out of his seclusion. Halley idly asked him what shape the orbit of a planet would take if its attraction to the sun followed the inverse square of the distance between them (Hooke's theory).

Newton knew the answer, due to his concentrated work for the past six years, and replied, "An ellipse." Newton claimed to have solved the problem some 18 years prior, during his hiatus from Cambridge and the plague, but he was unable to find his notes. Halley persuaded him to work out the problem mathematically and offered to pay all costs so that the ideas might be published, which it was, in Newton's Principia.

Upon the publication of the first edition of Principia in 1687, Robert Hooke immediately accused Newton of plagiarism, claiming that he had discovered the theory of inverse squares and that Newton had stolen his work. The charge was unfounded, as most scientists knew, for Hooke had only theorized on the idea and had never brought it to any level of proof.

Newton, however, was furious and strongly defended his discoveries. He withdrew all references to Hooke in his notes and threatened to withdraw from publishing the subsequent edition of Principia altogether.

Halley, who had invested much of himself in Newton's work, tried to make peace between the two men. While Newton begrudgingly agreed to insert a joint acknowledgment of Hooke's work (shared with Wren and Halley) in his discussion of the law of inverse squares, it did nothing to placate Hooke.

As the years went on, Hooke's life began to unravel. His beloved niece and companion died the same year that Principia was published, in 1687. As Newton's reputation and fame grew, Hooke's declined, causing him to become even more bitter and loathsome toward his rival.

To the very end, Hooke took every opportunity he could to offend Newton. Knowing that his rival would soon be elected president of the Royal Society, Hooke refused to retire until the year of his death, in 1703.

Newton and Alchemy

Following the publication of Principia, Newton was ready for a new direction in life. He no longer found contentment in his position at Cambridge and was becoming more involved in other issues.

He helped lead the resistance to King James II's attempts to reinstitute Catholic teaching at Cambridge, and in 1689 he was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament.

While in London, Newton acquainted himself with a broader group of intellectuals and became acquainted with political philosopher John Locke. Though many of the scientists on the continent continued to teach the mechanical world according to Aristotle, a young generation of British scientists became captivated with Newton's new view of the physical world and recognized him as their leader.

One of these admirers was Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss mathematician whom Newton befriended while in London.

However, within a few years, Newton fell into another nervous breakdown in 1693. The cause is open to speculation: his disappointment over not being appointed to a higher position by England's new monarchs, William III and Mary II, or the subsequent loss of his friendship with Duillier; exhaustion from being overworked; or perhaps chronic mercury poisoning after decades of alchemical research.

It's difficult to know the exact cause, but evidence suggests that letters written by Newton to several of his London acquaintances and friends, including Duillier, seemed deranged and paranoiac, and accused them of betrayal and conspiracy.

Oddly enough, Newton recovered quickly, wrote letters of apology to friends, and was back to work within a few months. He emerged with all his intellectual facilities intact, but seemed to have lost interest in scientific problems and now favored pursuing prophecy and scripture and the study of alchemy.

While some might see this as work beneath the man who had revolutionized science, it might be more properly attributed to Newton responding to the issues of the time in turbulent 17th century Britain.

Many intellectuals were grappling with the meaning of many different subjects, not least of which were religion, politics and the very purpose of life. Modern science was still so new that no one knew for sure how it measured up against older philosophies.

Gold Standard

In 1696, Newton was able to attain the governmental position he had long sought: warden of the Mint; after acquiring this new title, he permanently moved to London and lived with his niece, Catherine Barton.

Barton was the mistress of Lord Halifax, a high-ranking government official who was instrumental in having Newton promoted, in 1699, to master of the Mint-a position that he would hold until his death.

Not wanting it to be considered a mere honorary position, Newton approached the job in earnest, reforming the currency and severely punishing counterfeiters. As master of the Mint, Newton moved the British currency, the pound sterling, from the silver to the gold standard.

The Royal Society

In 1703, Newton was elected president of the Royal Society upon Robert Hooke's death. However, Newton never seemed to understand the notion of science as a cooperative venture, and his ambition and fierce defense of his own discoveries continued to lead him from one conflict to another with other scientists.

By most accounts, Newton's tenure at the society was tyrannical and autocratic; he was able to control the lives and careers of younger scientists with absolute power.

In 1705, in a controversy that had been brewing for several years, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz publicly accused Newton of plagiarizing his research, claiming he had discovered infinitesimal calculus several years before the publication of Principia.

In 1712, the Royal Society appointed a committee to investigate the matter. Of course, since Newton was president of the society, he was able to appoint the committee's members and oversee its investigation. Not surprisingly, the committee concluded Newton's priority over the discovery.

That same year, in another of Newton's more flagrant episodes of tyranny, he published without permission the notes of astronomer John Flamsteed. It seems the astronomer had collected a massive body of data from his years at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England.

Newton had requested a large volume of Flamsteed's notes for his revisions to Principia. Annoyed when Flamsteed wouldn't provide him with more information as quickly as he wanted it, Newton used his influence as president of the Royal Society to be named the chairman of the body of "visitors" responsible for the Royal Observatory.

He then tried to force the immediate publication of Flamsteed's catalogue of the stars, as well as all of Flamsteed's notes, edited and unedited. To add insult to injury, Newton arranged for Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmund Halley, to prepare the notes for press.

Flamsteed was finally able to get a court order forcing Newton to cease his plans for publication and return the notes-one of the few times that Newton was bested by one of his rivals.

Final Years

Toward the end of this life, Newton lived at Cranbury Park, near Winchester, England, with his niece, Catherine (Barton) Conduitt, and her husband, John Conduitt.

By this time, Newton had become one of the most famous men in Europe. His scientific discoveries were unchallenged. He also had become wealthy, investing his sizable income wisely and bestowing sizable gifts to charity.

Despite his fame, Newton's life was far from perfect: He never married or made many friends, and in his later years, a combination of pride, insecurity and side trips on peculiar scientific inquiries led even some of his few friends to worry about his mental stability.

How Did Isaac Newton Die?

By the time he reached 80 years of age, Newton was experiencing digestion problems and had to drastically change his diet and mobility.

In March 1727, Newton experienced severe pain in his abdomen and blacked out, never to regain consciousness. He died the next day, on March 31, 1727, at the age of 84.

Legacy

Newton's fame grew even more after his death, as many of his contemporaries proclaimed him the greatest genius who ever lived. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but his discoveries had a large impact on Western thought, leading to comparisons to the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Galileo.

Although his discoveries were among many made during the Scientific Revolution, Newton's universal principles of gravity found no parallels in science at the time.

Of course, Newton was proven wrong on some of his key assumptions. In the 20th century, Albert Einstein would overturn Newton's concept of the universe, stating that space, distance and motion were not absolute but relative and that the universe was more fantastic than Newton had ever conceived.

Newton might not have been surprised: In his later life, when asked for an assessment of his achievements, he replied, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

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Isaac Newton was a physicist and mathematician who developed the principles of modern physics, including the laws of motion and is credited as one of the great minds of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. In 1687, he published his most acclaimed work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which has been called the single most influential book on physics.

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Who Was Alexander Graham Bell?

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor best known for inventing the first working telephone in 1876 and founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.

Bell's success came through his experiments in sound and the furthering of his family's interest in assisting the deaf with communication. Bell worked with Thomas Watson on the telephone, though his prodigious intellect would allow him to work on numerous other inventions, including flying machines and hydrofoils.

Early Life and Family

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. The second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, he was named for his paternal grandfather. The middle name "Graham" was added when he was 10 years old.

He had two brothers, Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell, both of whom died from tuberculosis.

During his youth, Bell was strongly influenced by his family and his environs. Bell's hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, was known as the "Athens of the North" for its rich culture of arts and science.

His grandfather and father were experts on the mechanics of voice and elocution. And Bell's mother, Eliza, became an accomplished pianist despite being deaf, inspiring him to undertake big challenges.

Eliza home-schooled her son and instilled an infinite curiosity of the world around him. He received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh's acclaimed Royal High School.

Though a mediocre student, Bell displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. At age 12, while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noticed the slow process of husking the wheat grain. He went home and built a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes that easily removed the husks from the grain.

Early Career

Young Alexander was groomed from a young age to carry on in the family business, but his headstrong nature conflicted with his father's overbearing manner. Seeking a way out, Alexander volunteered to care for his grandfather when he fell ill in 1862.

The elder Bell encouraged young Alexander and instilled an appreciation for learning and intellectual pursuits. By age 16, Alexander had joined his father in his work with the deaf and soon assumed full charge of his father's London operations.

On one of his trips to North America, Alexander's father decided it was a healthier environment and decided to move the family there. At first, Alexander resisted, for he was establishing himself in London. He eventually relented after both his brothers died of tuberculosis.

In 1870, the family settled in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. There, Alexander set up a workshop to continue his study of the human voice.

On July 11, 1877, Bell married Mable Hubbard, a former student and the daughter of Gardiner Hubbard, one of his early financial backers. Mable had been deaf since her early childhood years.

Alexander Graham Bell's Inventions

Bell is credited with inventing the telephone; in all, he personally held 18 patents along with 12 he shared with collaborators.

Telephone

On March 10, 1876, after years of work, Bell perfected his most well-known invention, the telephone, and made his first telephone call.

Before then, Bell in 1871 started working on a device known as the multiple or harmonic telegraph (a telegraph transmission of several messages set to different frequencies) upon moving to Boston. He found financial backing through local investors Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard.

Between 1873 and 1874, Bell spent long days and nights trying to perfect the harmonic telegraph. But during his experiments, he became interested in another idea, transmitting the human voice over wires.

Bell's diversion frustrated his benefactors, and Thomas Watson, a skilled electrician, was hired to refocus Bell on the harmonic telegraph. But Watson soon became enamored with Bell's idea of voice transmission and the two created a great partnership with Bell being the idea man and Watson having the expertise to bring Bell's ideas to reality.

'Mr. Watson, come here - I want to see you'

Through 1874 and 1875, Bell and Watson labored on both the harmonic telegraph and a voice transmitting device. Though at first frustrated by the diversion, Bell's investors soon saw the value of voice transmission and filed a patent on the idea.

For now the concept was protected, but the device still had to be developed. In 1876, Bell and Watson were finally successful.

Legend has it that Bell knocked over a container of transmitting fluid and shouted, "Mr. Watson, come here - I want to see you." The more likely explanation was Bell heard a noise over the wire and called to Watson. In any case, Watson heard Bell's voice through the wire and thus, he received the first telephone call.

With this success, Bell began to promote the telephone in a series of public demonstrations. At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Bell demonstrated the telephone to the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, who exclaimed, "My God, it talks!" Other demonstrations followed, each at a greater distance than the last.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized on July 9, 1877. In January 1915, Bell was invited to make the first transcontinental phone call. From New York, he spoke with his former associate Watson in San Francisco.

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Other Inventions

By all accounts, Bell was not a sharp businessman and by 1880 began to turn business matters over to Hubbard and others so he could pursue a wide range of inventions and intellectual pursuits.

In 1880, Bell established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., an experimental facility devoted to scientific discovery.

Later in his life, Bell became fascinated with flight and began exploring the possibilities for flying machines and devices, starting with the tetrahedral kite in 1890s.

In 1907, Bell formed the Aerial Experiment Association with Glenn Curtiss and several other associates. The group developed several flying machines, including the Silver Dart.

The Silver Dart was the first powered aircraft flown in Canada. Bell later worked on hydrofoils and set a world speed record for this type of boat.

Legal Challenges

After their 1877 wedding, Alexander and Mable traveled to Europe demonstrating the telephone. Upon their return to the United States, Bell was summoned to Washington D.C. to defend his telephone patent from lawsuits.

Others claimed they had invented the telephone or had conceived of the idea before Bell. Over the next 18 years, the Bell Company faced over 550 court challenges, including several that went to the Supreme Court, but none were successful.

Even during the patent battles, the company grew. Between 1877 and 1886, over 150,000 people in the United States owned telephones.

Improvements were made on the device including the addition of a microphone, invented by Thomas Edison, which eliminated the need to shout into the telephone to be heard.

Later Life

Throughout his life, Bell continued his family's work with the deaf, establishing the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890.

Eight years later, Bell assumed the presidency of a small, little-known U.S. scientific group, the National Geographic Society, and helped make their journal into one of the world's most-loved publications. Bell is also one of the founders of Science magazine.

Bell died peacefully on August 2, 1922, at his home in Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. Shortly after his death, the entire telephone system was shut down for one minute in tribute to his genius.

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Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor best known for inventing the first working telephone in 1876 and founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell's success came through his experiments in sound and the furthering of his family's interest in assisting the deaf with communication.

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Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor who is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. He designed two calculating devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, neither of which were fully built. Learn more about Babbage in this article.

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