Even William had to take second place after their first and only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743. Sarah would bring to her father joy and comfort to modify the pain caused by his son.
He was busy that year with a new project. In May he issued a circular letter headed “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in North America,” which be mailed to men of learning throughout the colonies. Now that the first drudgery of settling was over, he wrote, the time had come “to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock.”
For this purpose, he proposed formation of an organization whose members, through meetings or by correspondence, would exchange information on all new scientific discoveries or inventions, and he offered his own services as secretary “till they shall be provided with one more capable.” From this letter grew the American Philosophical Society, which came into being the following year. (The words “philosophical” and “scientific” were then used as synonyms.) Its activities were parallel to those of the famous Royal Society in London.
One of Franklin’s first contributions to the new society was a paper on his “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” which he and Debby had been enjoying several years, including diagrams and instructions on how to install it. He refused to patent his invention: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.”
Also in 1743 he printed his “Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” a pamphlet suggesting an academy of learning to match Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary College at Williamsburg. He launched this plan not as his own but as coming from some “public-spirited gentlemen,” a tactical approach he had figured out to be more effective than using his own name.
The academy, he wrote, should be “not far from a river, having a garden, orchard, meadow, and a field or two.” It should have a library. The students—youths from eight to sixteen—should “diet together plainly, temperately, and frugally.” They should be trained in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming.
Subjects studied should be “those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.” All should be taught to “write a fair hand” and to learn drawing, “a universal language, understood by all nations.” They should learn grammar, with Addison, Pope, and Cato’s Letters as models. He stressed the importance of elocution: “pronouncing properly, distinctly, emphatically.” The curriculum should include mathematics, astronomy, history, geography, ancient customs, morality, but not Latin and Greek, unless a student had “an ardent desire to learn them.”
Franklin’s ideal and surprisingly modern academy was also to teach practical matters: invention, manufactures, trade, mechanics, “that art by which weak men perform such wonders ...,” planting and grafting. There should be “now and then excursions made to the neighboring plantations of the best farmers, their methods observed and reasoned upon for the information of youth.”
This “Proposal” was the genesis of the University of Pennsylvania, which in six years’ time—1749—became a reality. (Franklin was elected first president, a post he held seven years.)
Philadelphia had as yet no regular police force. Its dark and narrow streets were in theory guarded by the local citizens, appointed in rotation by the ward constables. Often citizens preferred to pay the six shillings required to hire a substitute, money which might be dissipated in drink, leaving streets unguarded, or to pay the very ruffians against whom protection was needed. To abolish such abuses, Franklin persuaded his Junto members to campaign for a paid police force, which was voted a few years later.