by Nina Reid-Maroney

Nina Reid-Maroney traces the development of the 18th-century transatlantic fraternity of science—a community of men who were both curious and pious, educated and amateur, bound by a collegial network of correspondence and information exchange. She describes an informal, unpretentious scientific community that sought to demystify the exotic New World. By the time Franklin and friends founded the American Philosophical Society in 1769, Philadelphia was the “capital of the scientific Enlightenment on this side of the Atlantic.” Reid-Maroney asserts that Benjamin Franklin personified the Enlightenment ideal of a natural philosopher: congenial, convivial, and contagiously curious. Franklin shared both his successes and his failures with this extended network of learned men, always seeking to inspire others to experiment further. Though exalted as a hero for his electrical experiments, Franklin never took himself too seriously, whether he was accidentally electrocuting turkeys in his backyard or accepting the prestigious Copley Medal from the Royal Society.

Men of science and politics like Franklin, Rush, and Jefferson saw the democratic potential in nature’s system of checks and balances. The body politic of America was as much of an unknown quantity as the unfamiliar flora and fauna. Reid-Maroney illustrates how the loose confederation of natural philosophers mirrored the democratic development of the American government, and how the language of scientific experiment was employed for the purposes of political independence—the “republican experiment.”

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Image:  Mezzotint of Benjamin Franklin conducting his kite experiment, from a painting by Benjamin West.