Showing posts with label Benjamin Franklin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Benjamin Franklin. Show all posts

May 9 - First Cartoon in Franklin's Newspaper

   Posted on May 9, 2022

This is an update of my post published on May 9, 2011:




What is a cartoon? I bet you already know that answer...
                ….Or do you?

The word cartoon comes from Italian and Dutch words for heavy paper. A cartoon used to be a preparatory drawing made (on heavy paper) before starting a tapestry, fresco, stained glass window, or painting.

The term evolved to mean humorous illustrations printed in newspapers and magazines. (We more commonly call them comics now.)


The word cartoon is most used these days to mean animated television shows.

Many early newspaper cartoons were not meant to be funny. Instead, they were meant to make a point—often a political point. We call these sorts of illustrations political cartoons. That's the case with this first American cartoon, published on this day in 1754 in Benjamin Franklin's newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette. It showed a snake that was divided into eight pieces, and the caption read “JOIN, or DIE.” Can you imagine what the cartoon meant?

Hint: notice the initials next to each snake “bit.”

Second hint: Remember, there was no such thing as the United States in 1754. Instead, there was a series of British colonies up and down the coast of North America.
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I think Franklin was warning people that the British colonies should unite together under one government, or they will not be strong enough to survive. The eight sections of the snake were (in order from the head to the tail) New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Notice that there were four colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) in New England, and Franklin left Delaware and Georgia out of the cartoon! Apparently one of these being awfully small and one of them a new colony, Franklin didn't consider that they would be much help with defense.


A later (1775) version of Franklin's Join Or Die cartoon
appeared with Georgia included...




At the time that Franklin ran the cartoon in his newspaper, the colonies were in danger from French colonists to the north and from Indians. Franklin had proposed a union under the Albany Plan—and this cartoon was a quick visual argument for why others should go along with his plan. The cut-up snake became quite popular and was re-used and re-drawn many times. As a matter of fact, it's still current: A punk rock group named Sons of Liberty used the picture and caption for an album called “Join or Die,” and The Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson has the cartoon tattooed on the inside of one of his forearms!


Check out some more historical political cartoons at Harp Week, and current cartoons at Daryl Cagle's website. 






Also on this date:













Anniversary of the death of Opus sculptor 



Plan ahead:


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May 2 - You Go, Gulf Stream!

   Posted on May 2, 2022


This is an update of my post published on May 2, 2011:

Back in the old days, when there were no such things as telephones or computers, let alone cell phones and 4-G and the internet and WiFi, there were these things called letters. People would write on this stuff called paper, and they would get someone to physically carry their letters from one place to another. Sounds pretty slow, right?

Well, in the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin noticed that mail coming to America from Europe was even slower than the mail going from America to Europe. Boats crossing the Atlantic Ocean could travel westward at least a couple of weeks faster than boats traveling eastward.


An ocean current that acts like a river on the ocean is responsible for this extra speed. Although American whalers and some other seagoing people knew about this current by the 1700s, the knowledge wasn't as widespread as I'd imagined it would be. American whaling captain Timothy Folger told his cousin, Benjamin Franklin, that American whalers had explained to English sea captains how to use the current for maximum speed—but, he went on to say, the Brits had ignored the advice. Folger said the English captains were a bit snobbish and thought themselves “too wise to be counseled by simple American fishermen.” 

Benjamin Franklin was intrigued. He began a scientific study of the current in the Atlantic, measuring the temperatures of the water two or three times a day on his voyage home from England, and noting the water color and any seaweed he saw. Some sources claim that he completed his study on this day in 1775. 

Franklin and Folger drew charts to show the location of the current. Studies today, including satellite data, show that these early charts were remarkably accurate.


 

(By the way, did you know that we use the word charts for water in the same way we use the word maps for land?) 

Franklin explained the cause of the current—the accumulation of water on the eastern coast of America due to the constant trade winds. (Basically, he was right.)


Those yellow lines heading south and west represent the
North Trade Winds, and the blue lines heading north
and east represent the Westerlies. The global winds
affect the water currents of the ocean.

And Franklin named the current he discovered "the Gulf Stream." (We still use the name today.)

Still Important

Even though speed-of-light communication via electronic transmission and satellites has left the old moving-pieces-of-paper kind of communication behind in the dust, we still trade goods and catch fish and even travel by ship--and we still want to go with the current when traveling eastward across the Atlantic Ocean, and to avoid going against the current when traveling westward.

But there is another reason the Gulf Stream is so important: climate.

You see, the Gulf Stream is made up of warm water traveling up from the tropics and over the ocean to the British Isles. As it moves into colder areas of the world, the water slowly cools, of course—but it is still warm enough, when it reaches Europe, to keep England warmer than it would be without the Gulf Stream.


London and Cambridge, show here in the spring
(photo above and two photos below)
are roughly the same latitude as...




...Lake Baikal in Russia, also shown in the spring
(photo above and two photos below).
Yeah, you're looking at snow and ice!




Grab a globe and use it to check the latitude of England—and then compare that latitude to areas in Canada and Russia that are the same latitude. A little digging will show you that England's climate is milder than it ought to be, if latitude were the only factor:

  • London's average temperatures range from 45 to 58 degrees F (7 to 14 degrees C).
  • At around the same latitude, parts of Siberia enjoy temperatures from 28 to 44 degrees F (-2 to 7 degrees C). Much colder!
  • And at about the same latitude, the southern part of Labrador in Canada is classified as sub-arctic. The average temperatures range from -18 to 65 degrees F (-28 to 18 degrees C), and there is snow cover for months every winter.


Here is another chart from the pen of Benjamin
Franklin. It shows that he realized that the Gulf
Stream is actually a loop.


Also on this date:


Dos de Mayo in Spain


Anniversary of the first (modern) legend of Nessie




Plan ahead:

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January 17 - Happy Birthday, Ben Franklin

 Posted on January 17, 2021

This is an update of my January 17, 2010 post:



He was born 15th of 17 kids (!!!). 

He only had two years of formal schooling but became one of the best-educated people of his time. 

He was what's known as a polymath (someone who is good at a lot of things): a printer, scientist, inventor, newspaper publisher, writer, statesman, the first US Postmaster General and (at age 70) U.S. Minister to France...and lots more! 

Some of the things he invented are bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, the glass “armonica,” and an odometer.

Wow!

Benjamin Franklin was born on this day in 1706, and there is a lot to learn about him and much to celebrate.

Like, did you know that Franklin set up the first public library in the Americas? He set up the first fire department in Pennsylvania, too!

There are loads of fun Ben Franklin activities to be found on the internet. Here is one site with interesting stuff to read and do.

Franklin's Legacy

Of course, Americans honor Franklin's memory by having his image on the $100 bill and his name on countless cities, streets, and institutions, but did you know this:

Benjamin Franklin got the idea of leaving a small amount of money in a trust fund to gather interest for a long period of time from the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour (who used the idea as a plot point in a friendly parody about Franklin). Inspired, Franklin left 1,000 pounds (about $4,400 at the time) each to the cities of Boston (where he was born) and Philadelphia (where he lived most of his life), with the instructions that they gather interest for 200 years before being used to fund public projects of some sort. Franklin's Philadelphia trust had loaned the money to local residents, by and large for mortgage loans, for decades, and when the trust came due, the fund had grown to more than 2 million dollars; city leaders decided to use the money for scholarships for city youth. Boston had used some of the money at the 100-year mark to fund a trade school; later the entire fund, which had grown to almost 5 million dollars, was used to support the institute.

When Ben Franklin died, people in many countries mourned him, and about 20,000 people attended his funeral. According to the website Garden of Praise, people visiting his grave throw pennies on his headstone, and every year $6,000 worth of pennies are collected and given in Franklin's honor to charity.

Science and controversy

Franklin did a lot of thinking about, and some experimentation with, electricity and lightning.
 

He got the idea of trying to draw the lightning out of the clouds to a sharp-ended metal rod that draws the electrical charge harmlessly down into the ground. He proposed his lightning rod, with sharp ends, in 1749. (Between 1750 and 1754, a Czech man named Prokop Divis made an independent invention of a lightning protection device similar to Franklin's.)

Apparently there was a controversy about whether lightning rods should have sharp ends, as suggested by Franklin, or blunt ends. It became a bit of a political issue as King George and other Brits favored blunt-ended lightning rods. Of course, the colonies favored Franklin's design, a move that was reportedly seen by the British as just another way of being disobedient to the crown.

According to Wikipedia, the controversy over sharp or blunt ends is still not completely resolved! Doing controlled experiments with lightning is difficult, but in 2000 Moore, et al, published findings that blunt-tipped lightning rods are marginally better.

Another controversy over the lightning rods was the question of whether or not it was really right to use lightning rods; some people thought that lightning was an instrument of God's judgment. However, since churches tended to be the tallest buildings in any given town, and lightning thus struck churches far more often than, say, saloons, most religious people soon came to favor using the protective device.

It's interesting to note that, although some Christian clergy railed against the new invention, Prokop Divis, European inventor of the lightning rod, was a Catholic priest as well as a scientist.

Create music a la Franklin

Benjamin Franklin invented a musical instrument based on the wet-finger-on-the-drinking-glass. In Franklin's time, musicians sometimes performed on sets of carefully tuned glasses; Franklin created what he called a “more convenient” arrangement. He first called it a glassychord, but then decided on armonica, based on the word harmony.


Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of others composed musical pieces for the instrument, but the invention was largely abandoned when music performances moved to larger and larger venues—and music critics of the time bemoaned the fact that there was no way to make the armonica's sound louder.

Now we have microphones, but there are still only a dozen or so armonica players in the world. The 2007 movie Across the Universe featured the song "Girl," written by the Beatles, played on a glass harmonica (yet another name for this instrument!). And I love this version of Canon in D, played on a "glass harp"!

Create your own version of this instrument!

More fun

There are more experiments and some word puzzles about Franklin here.

This bust of Benjamin Franklin, called "Keys to Community" by James Peniston, features the casts of more than 1,000 keys incorporated into several of the surfaces. The keys were collected by the artist from children in the community of Philadelphia.







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