Ben as a Boy
With Ross
English - December 24, 2022 10:00 - 7 minutes - 6.7 MBPlaces & Travel Society & Culture Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Third episode in the Benjamin Franklin series.
Cover art compliments of Dall-E with the prompt: benjamin franklin as a boy in colonial boston
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
2:22 - Quote about Ben from Walter Isaacson
3:30 - Benjamin Franklin's Early Years
Quote from Walter Isaacson:
"Benjamin Franklin was, during his 84 year life America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of it’s most practical, though not profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented the a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant find raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government. But, the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself."
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