Today marks the 300th anniversay of the birth of the man who may be the original American geek: Benjamin Franklin. Born on January 17, 1706, Franklin was “one of the most extraordinary human beings the world has ever known” -- says PBS in its subsite devoted to the man. The Franklin Institute Online likens him to such modern-day fictional inventors as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ mad-scientist Dad... people we would unquestionably call geeky. Me, I think Franklin may be the 18th-century equivalent of Bill Gates: a man who made a fortune and a legacy for himself on business acumen, technological innovation, and maybe a soupcon of controversy.
Franklin wasn’t the equivalent of a Generation Xer of his day, like George Washington and John Adams and most of the other Founding Fathers, who were younger than him -- he was more like a Boomer. And yet, as Time magazine described Franklin in 2003:
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us.... He was, during his 84-year life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers.
Between the snarky sense of humor and the pragmatism, he sure sounds Xer-ish.
Check out the Wikipedia entry on Franklin, and the events the city of Philadelphia has planned for this anniversary year.
(That image up at the top of the post? It’s from The Alcohol Tarot.)
