Image description
The image shows, from the front, the portrait of the American inventor Benjamin Franklin.
He is a man in his sixties, with a balding head and a broad forehead, with long hair falling on his shoulders, combed behind his ears, middle part, marked embossed.
He has thin, arched eyebrows, rendered by two thick, curved lines, and large eyes.
He has a long nose with a convex tip at the bottom edge, thin lips, rendered by two thick and curved lines, located under the nose and a wide chin with sagging jowls.
He is wearing a vintage suit with a high-waisted vest, buttoned at the chest.
The collar on the neck is highlighted by a wide, horizontal and curved band, filled with dotted texture.
The vest is rendered by wavy texture, and the contrast at the edge of the buttons by a vertical band, filled with texture of horizontal and parallel lines, located on the center of the chest.
The button on the central border is highlighted by an embossed circle, the bottom edge.
General information
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, USA, on the 17th of January, 1706.
His father, Josiah, was a soap and candle maker. Benjamin is one of the best famous personalities in the history of the United States, one of the US founders, diplomat, scientist, inventor, philosopher, professor and politician.
At the age of 10, Benjamin started to help in his father’s candle store by cutting candles. Although he attended school for only 2 years, he did a lot of reading in his spare time. He also liked swimming, one of his inventions being a device which helped him swim faster.
At the age of 12, he went to work as an apprentice for his brother James’ printing house. Every night, he studied classic and contemporary writers, as well as arithmetic, navigation and grammar. After a while he became an expert in journalism and typography. He secretly wrote a series of humorous letters which he sent to the gazette under the name of “Mrs. Silence Dogood” in which he was poking fun at the Harvard students and untalented poets.
When Franklin was 22, he started his first printing house along with a partner, Hugh Meredith. The two of them published a weekly called “The Pennsylvania Gazette”.
He married Deborah Read in 1730 and had 3 children. Franklin realized that lightning is an electrical discharge from the clouds. With the help of his son, William, Franklin realized an experiment to test this phenomenon. The two of them went in a field during a thunderstorm, they rose a kite and attracted the electrical charge with the help of a key.
In 1753 he invented the lightning nod to protect buildings from lightning.
He was elected member of the Royal Society and received the “Copley Medal” after carrying out multiple experiments and published a book about electricity, The Modern Electrical Theory is based on his principles. He sent the results of the experiments to scientists in England and France who were impressed and elected him as a member of the aforementioned society.
He was elected as one of the 8 foreign associates of the Royal Academy of Sciences from Paris. He organized the first library in America, he had many inventions and surprised scientists around the world with his electrical experiments.
At that time, he was known also in Europe and was the one who convinced the British to withdraw the “Stamp Act” and also the French to intervene in the Independence War. In the United States, he contributed to the Declaration of Independence and the USA Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin died at the age of 84, on the 17th of April 1790 and was buried next to his wife in the cemetery of the Philadelphia Christian Church.
Bibliography
https://www.ro.biography.name/inventatori/67-sua/214-benjamin-franklin-1706-179
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