9 Things You Didn't Know About Benjamin Franklin

Posted by Alex in Everything Else on June 20, 2008 at 7:39 pm


We probably all know that Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod or that he proposed the turkey as the national emblem of the United States.

But did you know that he was related to the Folger family (of the coffee fame)? Or that he also invented the bifocal glasses?

Read more of the 9 Things You Didn’t Know About Benjamin Franklin: Link – Thanks Tony Servies!


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5 comments to "9 Things You Didn't Know About Benjamin Franklin"

  1. Alecks
    June 21st, 2008 at 11:14 am

    He also did not actually ever conduct the "kite attached to a key in a thunderstorm" experiment, and did not write many of the aphorisms in the Poor Richard's Almanac, but lifted them from other writers of the time, sometimes leaving them as is, sometimes making them more memorable by giving them coarseness or succinctness.

    And this is totally unverified, but he attended meetings of a friend's "Hellfire Club," where they participated in orgies.

    yeah.

  2. JC
    June 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pm

    Yeah, Hellfire rules.

  3. Lasse
    June 22nd, 2008 at 8:37 am

    He also enjoyed nude "air baths".

  4. Thomas
    June 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    My favorite aphorism is a ripoff of "might makes right." He wrote, "Force shites on reason."

  5. roger
    June 22nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    He was also an adept amateur mathematician, who created the magic circle (variation on the magic square):

    http://www.pasles.org/circle.html


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