Ben Franklin's Inventions: Famous and Not

Ben Franklin had a knack. That's how Orson Scott Card described him in his alt-history series, The Tales of Alvin Maker. In those books, Franklin was acknowledged a true wizard. In real history. . . he's pretty much a true wizard too.

Take bifocals, f'rinstance. Once we had a pair of glasses for reading, and another pair for looking across the road, how difficult was it to realize that glass could be cut and re-melded, so that one pair of spectacles served the same purpose? Apparently, quite difficult, because no one thought of it till Franklin.

Kinda like the plastic squeezable mayonaise bottle. Why didn't we have that in the 70s? It's so obvious!

His Franklin stove (pictured) was much more efficient than a plain old fireplace. It sat in the fireplace enclosure, used the same chimney, but required less wood to heat a room. Like ALL his inventions, the stove was never patented but put into the public domain.

Franklin also invented swim fins--his were made of wood.

He invented an odometer and attached it to a carriage. He used it to measure postal routes.

Since one of Franklin's many brothers suffered from kidney stones, Ben invented a flexible catheter. No one had thought of that before, either.

In Franklin's day, electricity was parlor-trick stuff. No one was sure how it worked, what caused it, or if it could be used.

Franklin's kite-flying experiment in 1752 confirmed what he'd suspected: that lightning was made of electrical currents, and that its power could be captured and directed--and used! According to the Franklin Institute, he invented a new vocabulary to describe electricity: battery, conductor, condenser, charge, discharge, uncharged, negative, minus, plus, electric shock, and electrician. Believe it or not, scientists before Franklin referred to electricity as "resinous."

You probably know that Franklin invented the lightning rod--a rod which attracted lightning, keeping it away from buildings that might catch fire. A lesser-known device were lightning bells, which would ring when electricity was in the air.

Slightly related to this--via worrying about fires caused by lightning--Franklin was also the first to organize a volunteer fire department (in Philadelphia) and even proposed fire insurance.

People complain constantly about daylight savings time. (In Arizona, they do not observe it--and after two years there, I realized just how convenient it was NOT to change the time twice a year.)

Love it or hate it, Franklin came up with the original idea while living in France. He told friends that if people simply adjusted their clocks to take advantage of the changing daylight hours, they'd use less candles.

But no one knows if he was really serious about that one.

OK, so Daylight Savings Time wasn't that great an idea--but he probably joking. How about these others?

He was the first to figure out--from observing weather patterns--that there was such a thing as the Gulf Stream, and mapped it out.

When the Founding Fathers became deadlocked over what kind of representatives the new United States would have, Franklin worked out a compromise that Americans still use: the Senate has two reps from each state, while the House of Representatives gives each state reps based on their population.

He created a musical instrument, the glass armonica. It's not so popular now, but composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Saint-Saens wrote music for it.

Then there's the first public library, the first political cartoons . . . and how about self-improvement, 200 years before it got trendy? Franklin-Covey, who makes the Franklin Planner line of calendar books, incorporates Ben's goal-setting, self-improvement philosophy as outlined in his autobiography in their products.