Benjamin Franklin Trivia

Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, had seven sisters and nine brothers. He was the fifteenth child and youngest son.  When he died at 84, nearly 200,000 admirers attended his funeral.

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography was the best-seller of the year in America in 1794. It was published in England the year before, three years after Franklin's death.

Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was the 15th of 17 siblings.

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, "An Economical Project." By increasing the available amount of daylight during the summer and decreasing it during the winter season, Franklin hoped to provide the world with a greater opportunity of doing productive work during the summer months, as opposed to the cold and dreary days of winter. Although Ben Franklin suggested it, it was first adopted in 1916 during World War I, in several counties in Europe, although it was proposed several times before, but rejected.

Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle a "bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

He devised the first wet suit for divers, as well as a primitive version of today’s flippers.

Benjamin Franklin slept in four beds every night. He had a theory that a warm bed sapped a man’s vitality. So when one bed became too warm, Ben jumped into another.

Benjamin Franklin drew the first cartoon ever published in an American newspaper. His drawing appeared in the "Pennsylvania Gazette" on May 9, 1754.

Ben Franklin was once considered a traitor. Mobs almost burned down Ben Franklin's house during the Stamp Act crisis. When the hated taxes were first enacted, Franklin, in England on official business, assumed he would have to go along with them, so he bought tax stamps for his newspaper. When word word reached Philadelphia, the citizens were enraged. His wife fortified herself in an upstairs room of their house, which she filled with guns and ammunition. Fortunately, the incident passed peacefully.

It could be said that American pioneer Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, along with many other things. Anyone looking at a list of Benjamin Franklin's inventions would see a man of many talents and interests. Indeed, it was the scientist in Franklin that brought out the inventor - his natural curiosity about things and the way they work made him try to find ways to make them work better. For example, Franklin had poor vision and needed glasses to read. He got tired of constantly taking them off and putting them back on, so he decided to figure out a way to make his glasses let him see both near and far. He had two pairs of spectacles cut in half and put half of each lens in a single frame. Today, we call these types of glasses bifocals. Although he did make many important discoveries and advancements, Ben did not "invent" electricity. He did, however, invent the lightning rod which protected buildings and ships from lightning damage. Did Benjamin Franklin really invent the harmonica?

No, but he did invent something called the glass harmonica which noted composers of the day (such as a couple of hacks named Mozart and Beethoven) incorporated into some of their works. From 1757 to 1766, Benjamin Franklin served as a delegate for colonial America which caused him to spend a great deal of time in London and Paris. During this period, it was quite popular and entertaining for amateur musicians to perform on sets of singing glasses. Franklin was taken by the "utopian and ethereal beauty" of the sound, and immediately, set to work on refining said sound into a proper musical instrument. Franklin used wine glasses of varying sizes to create his harmonica, first removing the stems and drilling through the bottoms. After corking these holes, he mounted the glasses (in order of increasing size) onto a horizontal spindle. This spindle was rotated over a foot treadle at a rapid speed. Musicians played the instrument by touching moistened fingers to the edges of the rotating glasses. The high-pitched sounds that emanated were due to the vibrations from within the air column of the glasses. The delicate, ethereal beauty of the sound made it a popular instrument of its day.

Around the mid-nineteenth century, with the decline of Romanticism, Franklin's instrument fell into decline and even disrepute. Indeed, the notorious hypnotist Dr. Frank Mesmer used the glass harmonica in his therapy sessions, giving it a negative connotation. For years, few people were aware of its existence. Fortunately for us, today the instrument is making a concerted revival due to the handcrafted and excellent sounding models constructed by master glassblower Gerhard Finkenbeiner.