IX. THE FATHERS OF ELECTRICITY

X. THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



THE AGE OF INVENTION

CHAPTER I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES

On Milk Street, in Boston, opposite the Old South Church, lived
Josiah Franklin, a maker of soap and candles. He had come to
Boston with his wife about the year 1682 from the parish of
Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, where his family had lived on a
small freehold for about three hundred years. His English wife
had died, leaving him seven children, and he had married a
colonial girl, Abiah Folger, whose father, Peter Folger, was a
man of some note in early Massachusetts.

Josiah Franklin was fifty-one and his wife Abiah thirty-nine,
when the first illustrious American inventor was born in their
house on Milk Street, January 17, 1706. He was their eighth child
and Josiah's tenth son and was baptized Benjamin. What little we
know of Benjamin's childhood is contained in his "Autobiography",
which the world has accepted as one of its best books and which
was the first American book to be so accepted. In the crowded
household, where thirteen children grew to manhood and womanhood,