Old Ben could hunt high and low in contemporary Philadelphia for the reason and wisdom he cherished and not find a scintilla. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.live:
Proclaim L̶i̶b̶e̶r̶t̶y̶ Tranq Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.
If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.
― Benjamin Franklin
As a boy, Benjamin Franklin invented what swimmers train with today called hand paddles, resembling fish fins, for more efficient swimming in his local pond.
The future Docteur Franklin’s formal education lasted only two years and by age nine he was working for his father around the house. As a boy, he devoured books as Americans today devour junk food, tabloids, sportsball, and bizarre video confessionals of perfect strangers eating junk food inside their parked cars.
At age twelve, he signed a nine-year indentured servant contract in the printing press of his brother James who produced the first independent newspaper of the American colonies —The New England Courant—often publishing essays that challenged authorities and the stifling status quo of Puritan Massachusetts.
Franklin secretly submitted essays to his brother’s publication under the pseudonymous Silence Dogood, a widow he invented who made witty and scathing social observations that were a hit with readers.
When his brother was jailed for questioning the competence of Massachusetts authorities in capturing and prosecuting pirates, Benjamin took over three printings of the weekly Broadside at age fifteen.
In one he published the first printed challenge in the colonies toward crown authorities regarding freedom of press, speech, and conscience. He did so in defense of his brother, in a piece partially lifted from a London Spectator article, under the widow Dogood’s name: Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another.
That was in 1720, in Boston.
