"Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
--- Benjamin Franklin on Order
The technological breakthrough of the printing press literally changed the world. The Age of Enlightenment could not have unfolded without mass-produced books through which knowledge could be dissiminated widely. Before the printing press, making one book could take months.
As such, Ben Franklin was fortunate indeed that his brother James had gone into the printing business and accepted Ben as an apprentice in a growth industry which suited his natural talents. Choosing the wrong career field can stymie the success of even the most ambitious and gifted.
This being the era before computers and word processing digitized the process of typing text, "compositors" like young Ben Franklin physically picked pre-sorted letters from their proper compartments and placed them into lines on a metal plate that would be inked and pressed on paper to create a printed page. Definintely slow compared to a laser printer, it was fast compared to a monk laboring by candle light to carefully copy words from a manuscript using a pen dipped in an ink well.
The print shop's letters had to be sorted into separate compartments, whether as they came from the foundry or when returned to the bins after the page had been printed as many times as necessary. If a letter was placed in the wrong bin, it might result in a careless compositor misspelling a word in the lines of type that could be misprinted hundreds or thousands of times if not caught.
This mistake could be quite exasperating, which resulted in a new phrase for this feeling caused by inadvertantly choosing the wrong letter, being "out of sorts." Fortunately for Benjamin Franklin, he always seemed to find himself in the proper place to be ready for the next great opportunity, which due to his orderly approach to life he was properly prepared.
Had James Franklin not been jailed for refusing to reveal the true identity of Silence Dogood, younger brother Benjamin would have likely continued through his internship and attained an honored if not overly remarkable position in the hierarchy of very orderly Boston society.
That would not have been a terrible fate. Boston was probably the most cultured city in the colonies, and it was the most literate city in the entire world, with 7 out of 10 citizens knowing how to read and write.
Boston's Cotton Mather, who alone wrote over 300 books, was an intellectual giant as well as a guiding light spiritually. Benjamin may have used Mather as a foil for his brother's newspaper, but he nonetheless benefited from Cotton's ethical vision, wisdom and example.
When Ben arrived in Philadelphia after a business squabble with his brother, he had no connections and only a few pennies in his pocket. He discovered an entirely different type of order than the social constraints of New England.
William Penn had laid out streets in a grid, with wide numbered streets crossed at right angles by streets named after trees. While Pennsylvania is blessed with a great deal of natural greenery, those streets named for trees helped justify the name Pennsyvlania, which translates as Penn's Forest.
Philadephia's design also included four square, green parks for public use as well as space for small gardens on each of the orderly housing lots where mostly brick buiuldings were constructed, with some homes as high as three stories. This also added to the green feel of a country town in an ideal location between two navigable rivers.
Because cargo ships could sail up the Delaware River from the Atlantic Ocean to a safe harbor buffered from storms and pirate attacks, Philadephia would soon become the second busiest port in the British Empire.
The downtown street grid made it quite easy to navigate Philadelphia, even for someone new to town. This early form of urban planning was markedly different from the winding, relatively haphazard layout of Boston streets.
As the city expanded over the centuries to cover 125 square miles, the grid gradually succumbed to some less orderly sprawl, but at the time of Ben Franklin, it was a model of orderly city planning. Cities like London, after the great fire, and Lisbon, after the devastating earthquake, had rebuilt in more orderly designs with wider streets to meet modern needs, but it certainly was an advantage to start with Philadelphia's city plan from the outset.
When young Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, he posessed well-honed skills as printer and writer developed in his brother's shop. Additionally, he had a document signed by James stating that Ben had completed his apprenticeship, even if Ben only had that because an apprentice could not own a newspaper, which his brother had been forced to sign over to him in order to gain release from prison.
He soon found a job at a print shop in the booming city, and with his skills, work-ethic and good-nature, he was welcomed with open arms into the City of Brotherly Love.
Back in Boston, Ben's father Josiah worried about his youngest son, which really speaks well for the order of the family structure in which Ben had been raised. None of Josiah's many children seemed to be lost in the shuffle. They went on to have successful careers in different fields and families of their own (with one of Ben's sisters being the exception). Josiah asked one of his prosperous sons-in-law, a merchant sailor, to be on the watch for Ben to let him know how he was doing.
Ben's brother-in-law happened to know the Governor of Pennsylvania, who he asked to watch over Ben. Ben impressed the Governor to the point that he wrote a letter of recommendation for the young man. While the letter didn't particularly impress Ben's father when Ben returned on a brief visit back to his home town, it did apparently open doors in London, England, where Ben sailed a short time later.
London dwarfed Philadelphia and Boston in size and population density. Just as he had in Philadelphia, Ben soon found work in a printing business in the city bustling with commerce from world trade. With his New England values, Ben soon became the most efficient of typesetters.
The other typesetters regularly drank a tankard of ale for breakfast, and then several more over the course of the day to keep their strength up, whereas Ben ate oatmeal for breakfast and bread at other times. With a clear mind, Ben could do his job more efficiently and accurately while not seeming to be at a disadvantage in strength. A penny's worth of bread, Ben said, gave him as much sustenance as two or three beers, and he could carry twice the loads of print type up the stairs as his co-workers.
Ben capitalized on an opportunity made possible by his temperance. The other print shop workers often ran out of beer money before the next paycheck, so Ben would loan them enough to buy their beers, adding interest. Not only did he spend less money himself, but he was profiting on what the othes spent on their beer.
One of Ben's work assignments had him typesetting a best selling philsophy book. As he worked on the time-consuming process, he naturally had plenty of time to contemplate the author's reasoning. Ben found he didn't agree with the book, so he wrote his own book challenging that author's thesis.
Despite being the Age of Enlightenment at the dawn of the printing age, it was also a time when London poor children were taught to read but not how to write (or any skills that might make them think they could ever find a place in society above their class position). As a literate writer who worked for a printer at a time when the public was hungry for this latest fad, books, Ben again benefited happenstance of preparedness meeting opportunity which Ben's ordered life made possible.
Ben Franklin's little book impressed some intellectuals among the London intelligencia. He found himself recruited into that set, which included Sir Isaac Newton, although he apparently never met him in person. These contacts led to Ben being admitted to The Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific academy in the world, when he returned to London decades later.
Making this rise of a 20-year-old American into the lofty ranks of London intellectual society more remarkable was that London still remained a very class-stratified metropolis. In Boston, there was a certain proper order to the rather homogenous society that was more strict than the "melting pot" of Philadelphia to which immigrants from all over Europe arrived, but both cities were still small enough to watch over the least among them and also to basically know the reputable or disreputable on sight.
London, however, was easily large enough to allow for anonymity, and any extreme that might require that cover to exist in the shadows. This type of Old World order was a class system allowed for the very rich to stay in their isolated, elite social spheres, while the destitute, prostitutes and orphans were left to fend for themselves in a gutter world.
Ben had started his London stay in a poor sector and rose like cream to the top. It was a rise made possible because of being that emerging child of the Enlightenment, a free American born with unlimited possibilities regardless of not having a landed title.
Ben could see the order that stratified European society, and while he enjoyed mingling with the upper crust, he would never un-see the social costs. Decades later, he would famously be a Founding Father for a revolutionary meritocracy with laws to protect equality of opportunity.
The Governor of Pennsylvania had promised to help fund a print shop when Ben returned to Philadelphia, but like with most politicians, that turned out to be all talk, but Ben managed to get rolling with a print shop of his own.
Franklin continued to pratice his thirteen virtues, focused on one each week. Without his adherence to Order, Benjamin Franklin could never have found time to achieve the magnitude of his accomplishments in the next couple of decades. He retired from commercial life at age 43.
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