The 70-year-old was already world renowned for his lighting experiments-the French even called their electrical experimenters “Franklinistes”-but his fame soared to new heights after his arrival in Paris.įranklin capitalized on the French conception of Americans as rustic frontiersmen by dressing plainly and wearing a fur hat, which soon became his trademark and appeared in countless French portraits and medallions. In 1776, the Continental Congress sent Franklin to France to seek military aid for the revolution. The elder Franklin never forgave his son for “taking up arms against me.” He all but cut William out of his will, arguing, “the part he acted against me in the late war…will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”Ĩ. He spent two years in a colonial prison for opposing the revolution, and later became a leader in a loyalist group before moving to England at the end of the war. While Franklin joined in calling for independence from the mother country, William remained a staunch Tory who branded the patriots “intemperate zealots” and refused to resign his post as the royal governor of New Jersey. The two were once close friends and partners-William helped Franklin with his famous kite experiment-but they later had a major falling out over the American Revolution. Before he publicly announced his support for American independence, a few even suspected he might be a British spy.įranklin unveiled his “Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling” in an essay published in 1779, but later scrapped the project after it failed to arouse public interest.Īlong with the two children he had with his wife, Deborah Read, Franklin also fathered an illegitimate son named William around 1730. Franklin had soured on the monarchy by the time he returned to the United States for the Second Continental Congress in 1775, but his past support for King George III earned him the suspicion of many of his fellow patriots. When the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, he dubbed it an “act of violent injustice on our part” and insisted that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses. Having lived in London for several years and held royal appointments, he instead pushed for peaceful compromise and the preservation of the empire, once writing that, “every encroachment on rights is not worth a rebellion.”
Franklin would later write that, “Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.”įranklin was among the last of the Founding Fathers to come out in favor of full separation from Britain.
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