44: Printing as High-Tech: Franklin's Wealth Creation and the Dawn of His Electrical Experiments. Richard Munson discusses how Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at age 17 and, in just 22 years, transformed into an independently wealthy experimente

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Printing as High-Tech: Franklin's Wealth Creation and the Dawn of His Electrical Experiments. Richard Munson discusses how Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at age 17 and, in just 22 years, transformed into an independently wealthy experimenter. Printing during this era was the "high-tech of the age," and Franklin's work involved scientific thinking. A powerful driving force was his ambition to be wealthy, maintaining a strong focus on the bottom line. Franklin leveraged quality to secure contracts and was a savvy real estate investor. Franklin became entangled in a bitter political fight with absentee landlord Thomas Penn, who viewed Pennsylvania solely as a source of money. Franklin's independent wealth, achieved when he sold his successful businesses around 1748, allowed him to pursue science. He immediately began experimenting with electricity, performing fundamental research and defining basic structures, introducing key terms like positive and negative, conductors and insulators. Franklin's rising fame as an experimenter eventually led his neighbors to call on him to represent Pennsylvania in London.

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