Bendzhamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston. He was the 15th child in the family (17 children in all) of Josiah Franklin (1652–1745), an immigrant from England, a craftsman engaged in the manufacture of soap and candles. He was educated on his own. Josiah wanted his son to attend school, but he could afford only two years of schooling. At the age of 12, Benjamin began working as an apprentice in his brother James’s printing shop, and printing became his main profession for many years. In 1727, he founded his own printing house in Philadelphia. He published the Pennsylvania Gazette (1729–1748) and the annual Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1758). In 1728, Benjamin Franklin founded the Philadelphia discussion circle of craftsmen and merchants, the “Leather Apron Club” (“Junto”), which in 1743 was transformed into the American Philosophical Society, among whose members from the 1770s to the 1860s 24 Russian scholars were elected, including T. I. von Klingstadt (1773), E. R. Dashkova (1789), P. S. Pallas (1791), F. P. Adelung (1818), I. F. Kruzenshtern (1824), and V. Ya. Struve (1853). He founded the first public library in America in 1731, the American Philosophical Society in 1743, and the Philadelphia Academy in 1751, which became the basis of the University of Pennsylvania. From 1737 to 1753 he served as postmaster of Pennsylvania, and from 1753 to 1774 he held the same office for all the North American colonies. In 1776 he was sent as ambassador to France to secure an alliance with it against England, as well as a loan. He was elected a member of academies in many countries, including the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1789 (the first American member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences). He was one of the authors of the United States Constitution (1787). He is the author of the aphorism “Time is money” (from Advice to a Young Tradesman, 1748).