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+title: "Andrew Crosse"
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+
+Andrew Crosse (17 June 1784 – 6 July 1855) was a British scientist who was born and died at Fyne Court, Broomfield, Somerset. Crosse was an early pioneer and experimenter in the use of electricity. He became known after press reports of an electrocrystallization experiment he conducted in 1836, during which insects "appeared".
+
+== Early life ==
+Crosse was the first son of Richard Crosse and Susannah Porter. In 1788 he accompanied them on a trip to France, where he went to school for a time in Orléans. From the age of six until he was eight he stayed with a tutor, the Reverend Mr White, in Dorchester, where he learned Greek. On 1 February 1792 he was sent to boarding school in Bristol.
+Around the age of 12, Crosse persuaded one of his teachers to let him attend a series of lectures on the natural sciences, the second of which was on the subject of electricity. This was the cause of his lifelong interest in the subject. Crosse first began experimenting with electricity during his time in the sixth form, when he built a Leyden jar. After leaving school, he studied at Brasenose College, Oxford.
+
+== Scientific research ==
+Having lost his parents, his father in 1800 and his mother in 1805, Crosse took over the management of the family estates at the age of 21. After abandoning his studies for the Bar, he increasingly devoted his spare time to studying electricity at Fyne Court, where he built his own laboratory. He also studied mineralogy and became interested in the formation of crystalline deposits in caves. Around 1807, he began to experiment with electrocrystallization, forming crystalline lime carbonate from water taken from Holwell Cavern. He returned to the subject again from around 1817 and in subsequent years produced a total of 24 electrocrystallised minerals.
+Among his experiments Crosse erected "an extensive apparatus for examining the electricity of the atmosphere," incorporating at one point an insulated wire some 1.25 miles (2.01 km) long, later shortened to 1,800 feet (550 m), suspended from poles and trees. Using this wire he was able to determine the polarity of the atmosphere under various weather conditions. His results were published by his friend George Singer in 1814, as part of Singer's Elements of Electricity and Electro-Chemistry.
+Along with Sir Humphry Davy (who visited Fyne Court in 1827), Crosse was one of the first to develop large voltaic piles. Although it was not the largest he built, Henry Minchin Noad's Manual of Electricity describes a battery consisting of 50 jars containing 73 square feet (6.8 m2) of coated surface. Using his wires Crosse was able to charge and discharge it some 20 times a minute, "accompanied by reports almost as loud as those of a cannon". He became known locally as "the thunder and lightning man". In 1836, Sir Richard Phillips described seeing a wide variety of voltaic piles at Fyne Court, totalling 2,500, of which 1,500 were in use when he visited.
+In 1836, Crosse was persuaded to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bristol. After describing his discoveries over dinner at the house of a friend in Bristol, he was further persuaded to recount them to both the chemical and the geological sections of the meeting. They included his electrocrystallization and atmospheric experiments, and his improvements to the voltaic battery.
+Crosse went on to separate copper from its ores using electrolysis, experimented with the electrolysis of sea water, wine and brandy to purify them, and examined the effects of electricity on vegetation. He was also interested in the practical uses of electricity and magnetism, including the development of loudspeakers and telegraphy although he did not do research in these areas himself.
+
+=== Controversy ===

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+title: "Andrew Crosse"
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+
+A few months after the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Crosse was conducting another electrocrystallization experiment when, on the 26th day of the experiment, he saw what he described as "the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail". More creatures appeared and two days later they began moving their legs. Over the next few weeks hundreds more appeared. They crawled around the table and hid themselves wherever they could find shelter. Crosse identified them as being members of the genus Acarus.
+Puzzled, Crosse mentioned the incident to a couple of friends. A local newspaper learned of the incident and published an article about the "extraordinary experiment," naming the insects Acarus crossii. The article was subsequently picked up by other newspapers across the country and elsewhere in Europe. Some readers apparently gained the impression that Crosse had somehow "created" the insects, or at least claimed to have done so. He received angry letters in which he was accused of blasphemy and trying to take God's place as a creator. Some of them included death threats.
+Other scientists tried to repeat the experiment. W. H. Weeks took extensive measures to assure a sealed environment by placing his experiment inside a bell jar. He obtained the same results as Crosse, but due to the controversy that Crosse's experiment had sparked, his work was never published. In February 1837 many newspapers reported that Michael Faraday had also replicated Crosse's results. However, this was not true. Faraday had not even attempted the experiment. Later researchers, such as fellow members of the London Electrical Society Henry Noad and Alfred Smee, were unable to replicate Crosse's results.
+Crosse did not claim that he had created the arthropods. He assumed that there were insect or arachnid eggs embedded in his samples. Later commentators agreed that the arachnids -since the Acarus genus are arachnids- were probably cheese mites or dust mites that had contaminated Crosse's instruments.
+It has been suggested that this episode was a source of inspiration for Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, but this cannot have been the case, since Crosse's experiments took place almost 20 years after the novel was first published. The idea appears to have originated in the book The Man Who Was Frankenstein (1979) by Peter Haining. Mary Shelley did, however, know Crosse through a mutual friend, the poet Robert Southey. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley reportedly attended a lecture by Crosse in London in December 1814, in which he allegedly explained his experiments with atmospheric electricity. However, Mary Shelley's diary speaks only of "Garnerin" as the lecturer. Similarly dubious is a claim that Edward W. Cox wrote a report of their visits to Fyne Court to see Crosse's work in the Taunton Courier in Autumn 1836. Percy had been dead for over a dozen years by then.
+
+== Other interests ==
+Crosse also wrote a great many poems and enjoyed walking on the Quantock Hills, in which Fyne Court is set, "at all hours of day and night, in all seasons".
+Crosse advocated the benefits of education for the lower classes, argued against emigration, and supported a campaign by local farmers against falling food prices and high taxes during the 1820s. He was also active in party politics, speaking in support of friends at election meetings. Following the Battle of Waterloo Crosse boarded a ship at Exeter to see the captured Napoleon Bonaparte on the deck of HMS Bellerophon near Plymouth. Crosse also served as a magistrate.
+
+== Personal life ==
+Crosse married Mary Anne Hamilton in 1809. They had seven children, although three died in childhood. Mary died in 1846 following several years of ill health.
+On 22 July 1850 Crosse married again, aged 66. His second wife was the 23-year-old Cornelia Augusta Hewett Berkeley. They went on to have three children.
+Crosse suffered a stroke while dressing on the morning on 26 May 1855. He died on 6 July 1855, in the same room in which he had been born.
+The Italian writer Dacia Maraini is his great-great-granddaughter, the socialite Cornelia Edith "Yoï" Crosse being his granddaughter and her grandmother.
+
+== Memorial ==
+The laboratory table on which Crosse carried out experiments stands in the aisle of the Church of St Mary & All Saints, Broomfield, and an obelisk in his memory is in the churchyard.
+Crosse's home, Fyne Court, was largely destroyed by fire in 1894. The garden and the 65-acre (260,000 m2) estate are now owned by the National Trust, and are open to visitors.
+
+== Documents ==
+A number of documents related to Andrew Crosse and his work are held in the Somerset Record Office. In December 2008 Somerset County Council acquired a further two letters for the sum of 400 pounds to add to the collection.
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Benjamin Franklin"
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+
+Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath: a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the most influential intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; and the first postmaster general.
+Born in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette at age 23. He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richard's Almanack, which he wrote under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders". After 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the policies of the British Parliament and the Crown. He pioneered and was the first president of the Academy and College of Philadelphia, which opened in 1751 and later became the University of Pennsylvania. He organized and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected its president in 1769. He was appointed deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in 1753, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network.
+Franklin was active in community affairs and colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. He became a hero in North America when, as an agent in London for several colonies, he spearheaded the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act by the British Parliament. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired as the first U.S. ambassador to France and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco–American relations. His efforts proved vital in securing French aid for the American Revolution. From 1785 to 1788, he served as President of Pennsylvania. From at least as early as 1735 through the following decades, Franklin owned at least seven slaves and ran "for sale" ads for slaves in his newspaper, but by the late 1750s, he had begun arguing against slavery, became an active abolitionist, and promoted the education and integration of African Americans into U.S. society.
+As a scientist, Franklin's studies of electricity made him a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics. He also charted and named the Gulf Stream current. His numerous important inventions include the lightning rod, bifocals, glass harmonica and the Franklin stove. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, the University of Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia's first fire department. 
+Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity. He was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris peace with Britain, and the Constitution. Foundational in defining the American ethos, Franklin has been called "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become".
+Franklin's life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and his status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen him honored for more than two centuries after his death on the $100 bill and in the names of many towns and counties, educational institutions and corporations, as well as in numerous cultural references and a portrait in the Oval Office. His more than 30,000 letters and documents have been collected in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot said of him: "Eripuit fulmen cœlo, mox sceptra tyrannis" ("He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants").
+
+== Ancestry ==
+Benjamin Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler, soaper, and candlemaker. Josiah Franklin was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, on December 23, 1657, to Thomas Franklin and Jane White. Benjamin's father and all four of his grandparents were born in England.
+Josiah Franklin had a total of seventeen children with his two wives. He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about 1677 in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in 1683; they had three children before emigration and four after. Following her death, Josiah married Abiah Folger on July 9, 1689, in the Old South Meeting House by Reverend Samuel Willard, and had ten children with her. Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin's fifteenth child overall, and his tenth and final son.
+Benjamin Franklin's mother, Abiah, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts Bay Colony, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher, and his wife, Mary Morrell Folger, a former indentured servant. Mary Folger came from a Puritan family that was among the first Pilgrims to flee to Massachusetts for religious freedom, sailing for Boston in 1635 after King Charles I of England had begun persecuting Puritans. Her father Peter was "the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America." As clerk of the court, he was arrested on February 10, 1676, and jailed on February 19 for his inability to pay bail. He spent over a year and a half in jail.
+
+== Early life and education ==
+
+=== Boston ===

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+Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, on January 17, 1706, and baptized at the Old South Meeting House in Boston. As a child growing up along the Charles River, Franklin recalled that he was "generally the leader among the boys."
+Franklin's father wanted him to attend school with the clergy but only had enough money to send him to school for two years. He attended Boston Latin School but did not graduate; he continued his education through voracious reading. Although "his parents talked of the church as a career" for Franklin, his schooling ended when he was ten. He worked for his father for a time, and at 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who taught him the printing trade. When Benjamin was 15, James founded The New-England Courant, which was the third newspaper founded in Boston.
+When denied the chance to write a letter to the paper for publication, Franklin adopted the pseudonym of "Silence Dogood", a middle-aged widow. Mrs. Dogood's letters were published and became a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the Courant's readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Benjamin when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. Franklin was an advocate of free speech from an early age. When his brother was jailed for three weeks in 1722 for publishing material unflattering to the governor, young Franklin took over the newspaper and had Mrs. Dogood proclaim, quoting Cato's Letters, "Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech." Franklin left his apprenticeship without his brother's permission, and in so doing became a fugitive.
+
+=== Moves to Philadelphia and London ===
+At age 17, Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, seeking a new start in a new city. When he first arrived, he worked in several printing shops there, but he was not satisfied by the immediate prospects in any of these jobs. After a few months, while Franklin was working in one printing house, Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith convinced him to go to London, ostensibly to acquire the equipment necessary for establishing another newspaper in Philadelphia. Discovering that Keith's promises of backing a newspaper were empty, he worked as a typesetter in a printer's shop in what is today the Lady Chapel of Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in the Smithfield area of London, which had at that time been deconsecrated. He returned to Philadelphia in 1726 with the help of Thomas Denham, an English merchant who had emigrated but returned to England, and who employed Franklin as a clerk, shopkeeper, and bookkeeper in his business.
+
+=== Junto and library ===
+
+In 1727, at age 21, Franklin formed the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia. The Junto was modeled after English coffeehouses that Franklin knew well and which had become the center of the spread of Enlightenment ideas in Britain.
+Reading was a great pastime of the Junto, but books were rare and expensive. The members created a library, initially assembled from their own books, after Franklin wrote:
+
+A proposition was made by me that since our books were often referr'd to in our disquisitions upon the inquiries, it might be convenient for us to have them altogether where we met, that upon occasion they might be consulted; and by thus clubbing our books to a common library, we should, while we lik'd to keep them together, have each of us the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole.
+This did not suffice, however. Franklin conceived the idea of a subscription library, which would pool the funds of the members to buy books for all to read. This was the birth of the Library Company of Philadelphia, whose charter he composed in 1731.
+
+=== Newspaperman ===

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+When rain has wet the kite twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it streams out plentifully from the key at the approach of your knuckle, and with this key a phial, or Leyden jar, may be charged: and from electric fire thus obtained spirits may be kindled, and all other electric experiments [may be] performed which are usually done by the help of a rubber glass globe or tube; and therefore the sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightening [sic] completely demonstrated.
+Franklin's electrical experiments led to his invention of the lightning rod. He said that conductors with a sharp rather than a smooth point could discharge silently and at a far greater distance. He surmised that this could help protect buildings from lightning by attaching "upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground; ... Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!" Following a series of experiments on Franklin's own house, lightning rods were installed on the Academy of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in 1752.
+Though Franklin is famously associated with kites from his lightning experiments, he has also been noted by many for using kites to pull humans and ships across waterways. George Pocock in the book A Treatise on The Aeropleustic Art, or Navigation in the Air, by means of Kites, or Buoyant Sails noted being inspired by Benjamin Franklin's traction of his body by kite power across a waterway.
+
+=== Thermodynamics ===
+Franklin noted a principle of refrigeration by observing that on a very hot day, he stayed cooler in a wet shirt in a breeze than he did in a dry one. To understand this phenomenon more clearly, he conducted experiments. In 1758 on a warm day in Cambridge, England, he and fellow scientist John Hadley experimented by continually wetting the ball of a mercury thermometer with ether and using bellows to evaporate the ether. With each subsequent evaporation, the thermometer read a lower temperature, eventually reaching 7 °F (−14 °C). Another thermometer showed that the room temperature was constant at 65 °F (18 °C). In his letter Cooling by Evaporation, Franklin noted that, "One may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day."
+
+In 1761, Franklin wrote a letter to Mary Stevenson describing his experiments on the relationship between color and heat absorption. He found that darker color clothes got hotter when exposed to sunlight than lighter color clothes, an early demonstration of black body thermal radiation. One experiment he performed consisted of placing square pieces of cloth of various color out in the snow on a sunny day. He waited some time and then measured that the black pieces sank furthest into the snow of all the colors, indicating that they got the hottest and melted the most snow.
+According to Michael Faraday, Franklin's experiments on the non-conduction of ice are worth mentioning, although the law of the general effect of liquefaction on electrolytes is not attributed to Franklin. However, as reported in 1836 by Franklin's great-grandson Alexander Dallas Bache of the University of Pennsylvania, the law of the effect of heat on the conduction of bodies otherwise non-conductors, for example, glass, could be attributed to Franklin. Franklin wrote, "... A certain quantity of heat will make some bodies good conductors, that will not otherwise conduct ..." and again, "... And water, though naturally a good conductor, will not conduct well when frozen into ice."
+
+=== Oceanography and hydrodynamics ===
+
+As deputy postmaster, Franklin became interested in North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns. While in England in 1768, he heard a complaint from the Colonial Board of Customs. British packet ships carrying mail had taken several weeks longer to reach New York than it took an average merchant ship to reach Newport, Rhode Island. The merchantmen had a longer and more complex voyage because they left from London, while the packets left from Falmouth in Cornwall. Franklin put the question to his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaler captain, who told him that merchant ships routinely avoided a strong eastbound mid-ocean current. The mail packet captains sailed dead into it, thus fighting an adverse current of 3 miles per hour (5 km/h). Franklin worked with Folger and other experienced ship captains, learning enough to chart the current and name it the Gulf Stream, by which it is still known today.
+Franklin published his Gulf Stream chart in 1770 in England, where it was ignored. Subsequent versions were printed in France in 1778 and the U.S. in 1786. The British original edition of the chart had been so thoroughly ignored that everyone assumed it was lost forever until Phil Richardson, a Woods Hole oceanographer and Gulf Stream expert, discovered it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1980. This find received front-page coverage in The New York Times. It took many years for British sea captains to adopt Franklin's advice on navigating the current; once they did, they were able to trim two weeks from their sailing time. In 1853, the oceanographer and cartographer Matthew Fontaine Maury noted that while Franklin charted and codified the Gulf Stream, he did not discover it:
+
+Though it was Dr. Franklin and Captain Tim Folger, who first turned the Gulf Stream to nautical account, the discovery that there was a Gulf Stream cannot be said to belong to either of them, for its existence was known to Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, and to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in the 16th century.

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+An aging Franklin accumulated all his oceanographic findings in Maritime Observations, published by the Philosophical Society's transactions in 1786. It contained ideas for sea anchors, catamaran hulls, watertight compartments, shipboard lightning rods and a soup bowl designed to stay stable in stormy weather.
+While traveling on a ship, Franklin had observed that the wake of a ship was diminished when the cooks scuttled their greasy water. He studied the effects on a large pond in Clapham Common, London. "I fetched out a cruet of oil and dropt a little of it on the water ... though not more than a teaspoon full, produced an instant calm over a space of several yards square." He later used the trick to "calm the waters" by carrying "a little oil in the hollow joint of [his] cane."
+
+=== Meteorology ===
+
+On October 21, 1743, according to the popular myth, a storm moving from the southwest denied Franklin the opportunity of witnessing a lunar eclipse. He was said to have noted that the prevailing winds were actually from the northeast, contrary to what he had expected. In correspondence with his brother, he learned that the same storm had not reached Boston until after the eclipse, despite the fact that Boston is to the northeast of Philadelphia. He deduced that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind, a concept that greatly influenced meteorology. After the Icelandic volcanic eruption of Laki in 1783, and the subsequent harsh European winter of 1784, Franklin made observations on the causal nature of these two seemingly separate events. He wrote about them in a lecture series.
+
+=== Population studies ===
+Franklin had a major influence on the emerging science of demography or population studies. In the 1730s and 1740s, he began taking notes on population growth, finding that the American population had the fastest growth rate on Earth. Emphasizing that population growth depended on food supplies, he emphasized the abundance of food and available farmland in America. He calculated that America's population was doubling every 20 years and would surpass that of England in a century. In 1751, he drafted Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. Four years later, it was anonymously printed in Boston and was quickly reproduced in Britain, where it influenced the economist Adam Smith and later the demographer Thomas Malthus, who credited Franklin for discovering a rule of population growth. Franklin's predictions on how British mercantilism was unsustainable alarmed British leaders who did not want to be surpassed by the colonies, so they became more willing to impose restrictions on the colonial economy.
+Kammen (1990) and Drake (2011) say Franklin's Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind (1755) stands alongside Ezra Stiles's "Discourse on Christian Union" (1760) as the leading works of 18th-century Anglo-American demography; Drake credits Franklin's "wide readership and prophetic insight." Franklin was also a pioneer in the study of slave demography, as shown in his 1755 essay. In his capacity as a farmer, he wrote at least one critique about the negative consequences of price controls, trade restrictions, and subsidy of the poor. This is succinctly preserved in his letter to the London Chronicle published November 29, 1766, titled "On the Price of Corn, and Management of the poor."
+
+=== Decision-making ===
+In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Franklin laid out the earliest known description of the pro & con list, a common decision-making technique, now sometimes called a decisional balance sheet:
+
+... my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.
+
+== Views on religion, morality, and slavery ==

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+Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous. All his life, he explored the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard's aphorisms. He felt that organized religion was necessary to keep men good to their fellow men, but rarely attended religious services himself. When he met Voltaire in Paris and asked his fellow member of the Enlightenment vanguard to bless his grandson, Voltaire said in English, "God and Liberty", and added, "this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin."
+Franklin's parents were both pious Puritans. The family attended the Old South Church, the most liberal Puritan congregation in Boston, where Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706. Franklin's father, a poor chandler, owned a copy of a book, Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good, by the Puritan preacher and family friend Cotton Mather, which Franklin often cited as a key influence on his life. "If I have been a useful citizen," Franklin wrote to Cotton Mather's son seventy years later, "the public owes the advantage of it to that book." His first pen name, Silence Dogood, paid homage both to the book and to a widely known sermon by Mather. The book preached the importance of forming voluntary associations to benefit society. Franklin learned about forming do-good associations from Mather, but his organizational skills made him the most influential force in making voluntarism an enduring part of the American ethos.
+Franklin formulated a presentation of his beliefs and published it in 1728. He no longer accepted the key Puritan ideas regarding salvation, the divinity of Jesus, or indeed much religious dogma. He classified himself as a deist in his 1771 autobiography, although he still considered himself a Christian. He retained a strong faith in a God as the wellspring of morality and goodness in man, and as a Providential actor in history responsible for American independence.
+At a critical impasse during the Constitutional Convention in June 1787, he attempted to introduce the practice of daily common prayer with these words:
+
+... In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. ... And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance. I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men....I therefore beg leave to move—that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.
+The motion gained almost no support and was never brought to a vote.
+Franklin was an enthusiastic admirer of the evangelical minister George Whitefield during the First Great Awakening. He did not himself subscribe to Whitefield's theology, but he admired Whitefield for exhorting people to worship God through good works. He published all of Whitefield's sermons and journals, thereby earning a lot of money and boosting the Great Awakening.
+When he stopped attending church, Franklin wrote in his autobiography:

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+... Sunday being my studying day, I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.
+Franklin retained a lifelong commitment to the non-religious Puritan virtues and political values he had grown up with, and through his civic work and publishing, he succeeded in passing these values into the American culture permanently. He had a "passion for virtue." These Puritan values included his devotion to egalitarianism, education, industry, thrift, honesty, temperance, charity and community spirit. Thomas Kidd states, "As an adult, Franklin touted ethical responsibility, industriousness, and benevolence, even as he jettisoned Christian orthodoxy."
+The classical authors read in the Enlightenment period taught an abstract ideal of republican government based on hierarchical social orders of king, aristocracy and commoners. It was widely believed that English liberties relied on their balance of power, but also hierarchal deference to the privileged class. "Puritanism ... and the epidemic evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification" by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, steeped in Puritanism and an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy.
+Franklin's commitment to teach these values was itself something he gained from his Puritan upbringing, with its stress on "inculcating virtue and character in themselves and their communities." These Puritan values and the desire to pass them on, were one of his quintessentially American characteristics and helped shape the character of the nation. Max Weber considered Franklin's ethical writings a culmination of the Protestant ethic, which ethic created the social conditions necessary for the birth of capitalism.
+One of his characteristics was his respect, tolerance and promotion of all churches. Referring to his experience in Philadelphia, he wrote in his autobiography, "new Places of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary Contribution, my Mite for such purpose, whatever might be the Sect, was never refused." "He helped create a new type of nation that would draw strength from its religious pluralism." The evangelical revivalists who were active mid-century, such as Whitefield, were the greatest advocates of religious freedom, "claiming liberty of conscience to be an 'inalienable right of every rational creature.'" Whitefield's supporters in Philadelphia, including Franklin, erected "a large, new hall, that ... could provide a pulpit to anyone of any belief." Franklin's rejection of dogma and doctrine and his stress on the God of ethics and morality and civic virtue made him the "prophet of tolerance." He composed "A Parable Against Persecution", an apocryphal 51st chapter of Genesis in which God teaches Abraham the duty of tolerance. While he was living in London in 1774, he was present at the birth of British Unitarianism, attending the inaugural session of the Essex Street Chapel, at which Theophilus Lindsey drew together the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in England; this was somewhat politically risky and pushed religious tolerance to new boundaries, as a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity was illegal until the 1813 Act.
+Although his parents had intended for him a career in the church, Franklin as a young man adopted the Enlightenment religious belief in deism, that God's truths can be found entirely through nature and reason, declaring, "I soon became a thorough Deist." He rejected Christian dogma in a 1725 pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which he later saw as an embarrassment, while simultaneously asserting that God is "all wise, all good, all powerful." He defended his rejection of religious dogma with these words: "I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me." After the disillusioning experience of seeing the decay in his own moral standards, and those of two friends in London whom he had converted to deism, Franklin decided that deism was true but it was not as useful in promoting personal morality as were the controls imposed by organized religion. Ralph Frasca contends that in his later life he can be considered a non-denominational Christian, although he did not believe Christ was divine.
+In a major scholarly study of his religion, Thomas Kidd argues that Franklin believed that true religiosity was a matter of personal morality and civic virtue. Kidd says Franklin maintained his lifelong resistance to orthodox Christianity while arriving finally at a "doctrineless, moralized Christianity." According to David Morgan, Franklin was a proponent of "generic religion." He prayed to "Powerful Goodness" and referred to God as "the infinite." John Adams noted that he was a mirror in which people saw their own religion: "The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker." Adams himself decided that Franklin best fit among the "Atheists, Deists, and Libertines." Whatever else Franklin was, concludes Morgan, "he was a true champion of generic religion." In a letter to Richard Price, Franklin states that he believes religion should support itself without help from the government, claiming, "When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
+In 1790, just about a month before he died, Franklin wrote a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, who had asked him his views on religion:

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+As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.
+On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed a three-member committee composed of Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams to design the Great Seal of the United States. Franklin's proposal (which was not adopted) featured the motto: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" and a scene from the Book of Exodus he took from the frontispiece of the Geneva Bible, with Moses, the Israelites, the pillar of fire, and George III depicted as pharaoh.
+
+The design that was produced was not acted upon by Congress, and the Great Seal's design was not finalized until a third committee was appointed in 1782.
+Franklin strongly supported the right to freedom of speech:
+
+In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech ...
+Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man ...
+
+=== Thirteen Virtues ===
+
+Franklin sought to cultivate his character by a plan of 13 virtues, which he developed at age 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice in some form for the rest of his life. His autobiography lists his 13 virtues as:
+
+Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
+Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
+Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
+Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
+Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
+Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
+Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
+Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
+Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
+Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
+Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
+Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
+Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
+Franklin did not try to work on them all at once. Instead, he worked on only one each week "leaving all others to their ordinary chance." While he did not adhere completely to the enumerated virtues, and by his own admission he fell short of them many times, he believed the attempt made him a better man, contributing greatly to his success and happiness, which is why in his autobiography, he devoted more pages to this plan than to any other single point and wrote, "I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit."
+
+=== Slavery ===
+Franklin's views and practices concerning slavery evolved over the course of his life. In his early years, Franklin owned seven slaves, including two men who worked in his household and his shop, but in his later years became an adherent of abolition. A revenue stream for his newspaper was paid ads for the sale of slaves and for the capture of runaway slaves and Franklin allowed the sale of slaves in his general store. He later became an outspoken critic of slavery. In 1758, he advocated the opening of a school for the education of black slaves in Philadelphia. He took two slaves to England with him, Peter and King. King escaped with a woman to live in the outskirts of London, and by 1758 he was working for a household in Suffolk. After returning from England in 1762, Franklin became more abolitionist in nature, attacking American slavery. In the wake of Somerset v Stewart, he voiced frustration at British abolitionists:

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+O Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!
+Franklin refused to publicly debate the issue of slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
+At the time of the American founding, there were about half a million slaves in the United States, mostly in the five southernmost states, where they made up 40% of the population. Many of the leading American founders – such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison – owned slaves, but many others did not. Benjamin Franklin thought that slavery was "an atrocious debasement of human nature" and "a source of serious evils." In 1787, Franklin and Benjamin Rush helped write a new constitution for the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and that same year Franklin became president of the organization. In 1790, Quakers from New York and Pennsylvania presented their petition for abolition to Congress. Their argument against slavery was backed by the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.
+In his later years, as Congress was forced to deal with the issue of slavery, Franklin wrote several essays that stressed the importance of the abolition of slavery and of the integration of African Americans into American society. These writings included:
+
+"An Address to the Public" (1789)
+"A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks" (1789)
+"Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade" (1790)
+
+=== Vegetarianism ===
+Franklin became a vegetarian when he was a teenager apprenticing at a print shop, after coming upon a book by the early vegetarian advocate Thomas Tryon. In addition, he would have also been familiar with the moral arguments espoused by prominent vegetarian Quakers in the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania, including Benjamin Lay and John Woolman. His reasons for vegetarianism were based on health, ethics, and economy:
+
+When about 16 years of age, I happen'd to meet with a book written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it ... [By not eating meat] I presently found that I could save half what [my brother] paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books: but I had another advantage in it ... I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.
+Franklin also declared the consumption of fish to be "unprovoked murder." Despite his convictions, he began to eat fish after being tempted by fried cod on a boat sailing from Boston, justifying the eating of animals by observing that the fish's stomach contained other fish. Nonetheless, he recognized the faulty ethics in this argument and would continue to be a vegetarian on and off. He was "excited" by tofu, which he learned of from the writings of a Spanish missionary to Southeast Asia, Domingo Fernández Navarrete. Franklin sent a sample of soybeans to prominent American botanist John Bartram and had previously written to British diplomat and Chinese trade expert James Flint inquiring as to how tofu was made, with their correspondence believed to be the first documented use of the word "tofu" in the English language.
+Franklin's "Second Reply to Vindex Patriae," a 1766 letter advocating self-sufficiency and less dependence on England, lists various examples of the bounty of American agricultural products, and does not mention meat. Detailing new American customs, he wrote that, "[t]hey resolved last spring to eat no more lamb; and not a joint of lamb has since been seen on any of their tables ... the sweet little creatures are all alive to this day, with the prettiest fleeces on their backs imaginable."
+
+=== View on inoculation ===
+The concept of preventing smallpox by variolation was introduced to colonial America by an African slave named Onesimus via his owner Cotton Mather in the early eighteenth century, but the procedure was not immediately accepted. James Franklin's newspaper carried articles in 1721 that vigorously denounced the concept.
+However, by 1736 Benjamin Franklin was known as a supporter of the procedure. Therefore, when four-year-old "Franky" died of smallpox, opponents of the procedure circulated rumors that the child had been inoculated, and that this was the cause of his subsequent death. When Franklin became aware of this gossip, he placed a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette, stating: "I do hereby sincerely declare, that he was not inoculated, but receiv'd the Distemper in the common Way of Infection ... I intended to have my Child inoculated." The child had a bad case of flux diarrhea, and his parents had waited for him to get well before having him inoculated. Franklin wrote in his Autobiography: "In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen."
+
+== Views on the future of technology ==
+In a letter to Joseph Priestley, dated February 8, 1780, Franklin speculated that in the future "all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard". In the same letter, Franklin wrote:

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+The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon: it is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter; we may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labour and double its produce...
+
+In 1773, Franklin imagined a technology similar to cryonics: 
+
+I wish it were possible to invent a method of embalming drowned persons in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence...
+
+== Interests and activities ==
+
+=== Musical endeavors ===
+
+Franklin is known to have played the violin, the harp, and the guitar. He also composed music, which included a string quartet in early classical style. While he was in London, he developed a much-improved version of the glass harmonica, in which the glasses rotate on a shaft, with the player's fingers held steady, instead of the other way around. He worked with the London glassblower Charles James to create it, and instruments based on his mechanical version soon found their way to other parts of Europe. Joseph Haydn, a fan of Franklin's enlightened ideas, had a glass harmonica in his instrument collection. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed for Franklin's glass harmonica, as did Ludwig van Beethoven. Gaetano Donizetti used the instrument in the accompaniment to Amelia's aria "Par che mi dica ancora" in the tragic opera Il castello di Kenilworth (1821), as did Camille Saint-Saëns in his 1886 The Carnival of the Animals. Richard Strauss calls for the glass harmonica in his 1917 Die Frau ohne Schatten, and numerous other composers used Franklin's instrument as well.
+
+=== Chess ===
+
+Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies. His essay on "The Morals of Chess" in Columbian Magazine in December 1786 is the second known writing on chess in America. This essay in praise of chess and prescribing a code of behavior for the game has been widely reprinted and translated. He and a friend used chess as a means of learning the Italian language, which both were studying; the winner of each game between them had the right to assign a task, such as parts of the Italian grammar to be learned by heart, to be performed by the loser before their next meeting.
+Franklin was able to play chess more frequently against stronger opposition during his many years as a civil servant and diplomat in England, where the game was far better established than in America. He was able to improve his playing standard by facing more experienced players during this period. He regularly attended Old Slaughter's Coffee House in London for chess and socializing, making many important personal contacts. While in Paris, both as a visitor and later as ambassador, he visited the famous Café de la Régence, which France's strongest players made their regular meeting place. No records of his games have survived, so it is not possible to ascertain his playing strength in modern terms.
+Franklin was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1999. The Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia, the second oldest chess club in the U.S., is named in his honor.
+
+== Legacy ==
+
+=== Bequest ===
+
+Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $125,000 in 2021 dollars) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack called Fortunate Richard. The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia.
+By 1990, more than $2,000,000 (~$4.23 million in 2024) had accumulated in Franklin's Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston, and the entire fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.
+In 1787, a group of prominent ministers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, proposed the foundation of a new college named in Franklin's honor. Franklin donated £200 towards the development of Franklin College (now called Franklin & Marshall College).
+
+=== Likeness and image ===
+
+As the only person to have signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Treaty of Alliance with France in 1778, Treaty of Paris in 1783, and U.S. Constitution in 1787, Franklin is considered one of the leading Founding Fathers of the United States. His pervasive influence in the early history of the nation has led to his being jocularly called "the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States."
+Franklin's likeness is ubiquitous. Since 1914, it has adorned American $100 bills. From 1948 to 1963, Franklin's portrait was on the half-dollar. He has appeared on a $50 bill and on several varieties of the $100 bill from 1914 and 1918. Franklin also appears on the $1,000 Series EE savings bond.

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+On April 12, 1976, as part of a bicentennial celebration, Congress dedicated a 20-foot (6 m) tall marble statue in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute as the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller presided over the dedication ceremony. Many of Franklin's personal possessions are on display at the institute. In London, his house at 36 Craven Street, which is the only surviving former residence of Franklin, was first marked with a blue plaque and has since been opened to the public as the Benjamin Franklin House. In 1998, workmen restoring the building dug up the remains of six children and four adults hidden below the home. A total of 15 bodies have been recovered. The Friends of Benjamin Franklin House (the organization responsible for the restoration) note that the bones were likely placed there by William Hewson, who lived in the house for two years and who had built a small anatomy school at the back of the house. They note that while Franklin likely knew what Hewson was doing, he probably did not participate in any dissections because he was much more of a physicist than a medical man.
+He has been honored on U.S. postage stamps many times. The image of Franklin, the first postmaster general of the United States, occurs on the face of U.S. postage more than any other American save that of George Washington. He appeared on the first U.S. postage stamp issued in 1847. From 1908 through 1923, the U.S. Post Office issued a series of postage stamps commonly referred to as the Washington–Franklin Issues, in which Washington and Franklin were depicted many times over a 14-year period, the longest run of any one series in U.S. postal history. However, he only appears on a few commemorative stamps. Some of the finest portrayals of Franklin on record can be found on the engravings inscribed on the face of U.S. postage.
+
+== See also ==
+
+Benjamin Franklin in popular culture
+Bibliography of early American publishers and printers
+Founders Online, database of Franklin's papers
+Franklin's electrostatic machine
+Fugio Cent, 1787 coin designed by Franklin
+List of early American publishers and printers
+List of opponents of slavery
+List of richest Americans in history
+The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
+Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism – 1784 French scientific bodies' investigations involving systematic controlled trials
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== Citations ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+
+== External links ==
+
+Benjamin Franklin and Electrostatics; Archived August 14, 2017, at the Wayback Machine experiments and Franklin's electrical writings from Wright Center for Science Education
+Benjamin Franklin Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
+Franklin's impact on medicine – talk by medical historian, Dr. Jim Leavesley celebrating the 300th anniversary of Franklin's birth on Okham's Razor, December 2006, ABC Radio National
+Video with sheet music of Benjamin Franklin's string quartet
+
+=== Biographical and guides ===
+
+Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
+"Special Report: Citizen Ben's Greatest Virtues" – Time
+"Writings of Benjamin Franklin" – American Writers: A Journey Through History by C-SPAN
+Benjamin Franklin: A Documentary History – Leo Lemay at the University of Delaware
+Benjamin Franklin: An extraordinary life – PBS
+Benjamin Franklin: First American Diplomat, 1776–1785 – U.S. State Department
+Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Franklin, Benjamin" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
+Finding Franklin: A Resource Guide – Library of Congress
+Guide to Benjamin Franklin; Archived March 16, 2010, at the Wayback Machine – Richard J. Jensen at the University of Illinois
+Online edition of Franklin's personal library
+The Electric Benjamin Franklin – ushistory.org
+Friends of Franklin Gazette (archived)
+
+=== Online writings ===
+"A Silence Dogood Sampler" – Selections from Franklin's Silence Dogood writings
+Abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer (1773), by Benjamin Franklin and Francis Dashwood, transcribed by Richard Mammana
+Franklin's Last Will & Testament Transcription.
+Library of Congress web resource: Benjamin Franklin ... In His Own Words
+Online Works by Franklin
+Works by Benjamin Franklin at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
+Works by Benjamin Franklin in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
+Works by Benjamin Franklin at Project Gutenberg
+Works by or about Benjamin Franklin at the Internet Archive
+Yale edition of complete works, the standard scholarly edition
+Online, searchable edition
+
+=== Autobiography ===
+The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin at Project Gutenberg
+The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin LibriVox recording
+
+=== In the arts ===
+Benjamin Franklin 300 (1706–2006); Archived August 20, 2008, at the Wayback Machine Official web site of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary.
+The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection of Benjamin Franklin Papers, including correspondence, government documents, writings and a copy of his will, are available for research use at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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+Upon Denham's death, Franklin returned to his former trade. In 1728, he set up a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith; the following year he became the publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper in Philadelphia. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, his commentary, and his adroit cultivation of a positive image as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect. But even after he achieved fame as a scientist and statesman, he habitually signed his letters with the unpretentious 'B. Franklin, Printer'.
+In 1732, he published the first German-language newspaper in America – Die Philadelphische Zeitung – although it failed after only one year because four other newly founded German papers quickly dominated the newspaper market. Franklin also printed Moravian religious books in German. He often visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, staying at the Moravian Sun Inn. In a 1751 pamphlet on demographic growth and its implications for the Thirteen Colonies, he called the Pennsylvania Germans "Palatine Boors" who could never acquire the "Complexion" of Anglo-American settlers and referred to "Blacks and Tawneys" as weakening the social structure of the colonies. Although he apparently reconsidered shortly thereafter, and the phrases were omitted from all later printings of the pamphlet, his views may have played a role in his political defeat in 1764.
+According to Ralph Frasca, Franklin promoted the printing press as a device to instruct colonial Americans in moral virtue. Frasca argues he saw this as a service to God, because he understood moral virtue in terms of actions, thus, doing good provides a service to God. Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers he believed that the press had a public-service duty.
+When he established himself in Philadelphia, shortly before 1730, the town boasted two "wretched little" news sheets, Andrew Bradford's The American Weekly Mercury and Samuel Keimer's Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette. This instruction in all arts and sciences consisted of weekly extracts from Chambers's Universal Dictionary. Franklin quickly did away with all of this when he took over the Instructor and made it The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette soon became his characteristic organ, which he freely used for satire, for the play of his wit, even for sheer excess of mischief or of fun. From the first, he had a way of adapting his models to his own uses. The series of essays called "The Busy-Body", which he wrote for Bradford's American Mercury in 1729, followed the general Addisonian form, already modified to suit homelier conditions. The thrifty Patience, in her busy little shop, complaining of the useless visitors who waste her valuable time, is related to the women who address Mr. Spectator. The Busy-Body himself is a true Censor Morum, as Isaac Bickerstaff had been in the Tatler. And a number of the fictitious characters, Ridentius, Eugenius, Cato, and Cretico, represent traditional 18th-century classicism. Franklin even used this classical framework for contemporary satire, as seen in the character of Cretico, the "sour Philosopher", who is clearly a caricature of his rival, Samuel Keimer.
+Franklin had mixed success in his plan to establish an inter-colonial network of newspapers that would produce a profit for him and disseminate virtue. Over the years he sponsored two dozen printers in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, Connecticut, and even the Caribbean. By 1753, eight of the fifteen English language newspapers in the colonies were published by him or his partners. He began in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1731. After his second editor died, the widow, Elizabeth Timothy, took over and made it a success. She was one of the colonial era's first woman printers. For three decades Franklin maintained a close business relationship with her and her son Peter Timothy, who took over the South Carolina Gazette in 1746. The Gazette was impartial in political debates, while creating the opportunity for public debate, which encouraged others to challenge authority. Timothy avoided blandness and crude bias and, after 1765, increasingly took a patriotic stand in the growing crisis with Great Britain. Franklin's Connecticut Gazette (1755–68), however, proved unsuccessful. As the Revolution approached, political strife slowly tore his network apart.
+
+=== Freemasonry ===
+In 1730 or 1731, Franklin was initiated into the local Masonic lodge. He became a grand master in 1734, indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania. The same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons. He was the secretary of St. John's Lodge in Philadelphia from 1735 to 1738.
+In January 1738, "Franklin appeared as a witness" in a manslaughter trial against two men who killed "a simple-minded apprentice" named Daniel Rees in a fake Masonic initiation gone wrong. One of the men "threw, or accidentally spilled, the burning spirits, and Daniel Rees died of his burns two days later." While Franklin did not directly participate in the hazing that led to Rees's death, he knew of the hazing before it turned fatal, and did nothing to stop it. He was criticized for his inaction in The American Weekly Mercury, by his publishing rival Andrew Bradford. Ultimately, "Franklin replied in his own defense in the Gazette."
+Franklin remained a Freemason for the rest of his life.
+
+=== Common-law marriage to Deborah Read ===

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+At age 17 in 1723, Franklin proposed to 15-year-old Deborah Read while a boarder in the Read home. At that time, Deborah's mother was wary of allowing her young daughter to marry Franklin, who was on his way to London at Governor Keith's request, and also because of his financial instability. Her own husband had recently died, and she declined Franklin's request to marry her daughter.
+Franklin travelled to London, and after he failed to communicate as expected with Deborah and her family, they interpreted his long silence as a breaking of his promises. At the urging of her mother, Deborah married a potter named John Rogers on August 5, 1725. John soon fled to Barbados with her dowry in order to avoid debts and prosecution. Since Rogers's fate was unknown, bigamy laws prevented Deborah from remarrying.
+Franklin returned in 1726 and resumed his courtship of Deborah. They established a common-law marriage on September 1, 1730. They took in his recently acknowledged illegitimate young son and raised him in their household. They had two children together. Their son, Francis Folger Franklin, was born in October 1732 and died of smallpox in 1736. Their daughter, Sarah "Sally" Franklin, was born in 1743 and eventually married Richard Bache.
+Deborah's fear of the sea meant that she never accompanied Franklin on any of his extended trips to Europe; another possible reason why they spent much time apart is that he may have blamed her for possibly preventing their son Francis from being inoculated against the disease that subsequently killed him. Deborah wrote to him in November 1769, saying she was ill due to "dissatisfied distress" from his prolonged absence, but he did not return until his business was done. Deborah Read Franklin died of a stroke on December 14, 1774, while Franklin was on an extended mission to Great Britain; he returned in 1775.
+
+=== William Franklin ===
+
+In 1730, 24-year-old Franklin publicly acknowledged his illegitimate son William and raised him in his household. William was born on February 22, 1730, but his mother's identity is unknown. He was educated in Philadelphia and beginning at about age 30 studied law in London in the early 1760s. William himself fathered an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, born on the same day and month: February 22, 1760. The boy's mother was never identified, and he was placed in foster care. In 1762, the elder William Franklin married Elizabeth Downes, daughter of a planter from Barbados, in London. In 1763, he was appointed as the last royal governor of New Jersey.
+A Loyalist to the king, William Franklin saw his relations with father Benjamin eventually break down over their differences about the American Revolutionary War, as Benjamin Franklin could never accept William's position. Deposed in 1776 by the revolutionary government of New Jersey, William was placed under house arrest at his home in Perth Amboy for six months. After the Declaration of Independence, he was formally taken into custody by order of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, an entity which he refused to recognize, regarding it as an "illegal assembly." He was incarcerated in Connecticut for two years, in Wallingford and Middletown, and, after being caught surreptitiously engaging Americans into supporting the Loyalist cause, was held in solitary confinement at Litchfield for eight months. When finally released in a prisoner exchange in 1778, he moved to New York City, which was occupied by the British at the time.
+While in New York City, he became leader of the Board of Associated Loyalists, a quasi-military organization chartered by King George III and headquartered in New York City. They initiated guerrilla forays into New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and New York counties north of the city. When British troops evacuated from New York, William Franklin left with them and sailed to England. He settled in London, never to return to North America. In the preliminary peace talks in 1782 with Britain, "... Benjamin Franklin insisted that loyalists who had borne arms against the United States would be excluded from this plea (that they be given a general pardon). He was undoubtedly thinking of William Franklin."
+
+=== Success as an author ===
+
+In 1732, Franklin began to publish the noted Poor Richard's Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based. He frequently wrote under pseudonyms. The first issue published was for the upcoming year, 1733. He had developed a distinct, signature style that was plain, pragmatic and had a sly, soft but self-deprecating tone with declarative sentences. Although it was no secret that he was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it. "Poor Richard's Proverbs", adages from this almanac, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear" (often misquoted as "A penny saved is a penny earned") and "Fish and visitors stink in three days", remain common quotations in the modern world. Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and his readers became well prepared. He sold about ten thousand copies per year—it became an institution. In 1741, Franklin began publishing The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America. He used the heraldic badge of the Prince of Wales as the cover illustration.
+Franklin wrote a letter, "Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress", dated June 25, 1745, in which he gives advice to a young man about channeling sexual urges. Due to its licentious nature, it was not published in collections of his papers during the 19th century. Federal court rulings from the mid-to-late 20th century cited the document as a reason for overturning obscenity laws and against censorship.
+
+== Public life ==
+
+=== Early steps in Pennsylvania ===

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+In 1736, Franklin created the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer firefighting companies in America. In the same year, he printed a new currency for New Jersey based on innovative anti-counterfeiting techniques he had devised. His political career also commenced, particularly as the Chief Clerk of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, a capacity wherein he served until 1751. Throughout his career, he was an advocate for paper money, publishing A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency in 1729, and his printer printed money. He was influential in the more restrained and thus successful monetary experiments in the Middle Colonies, which stopped deflation without causing excessive inflation. In 1766, he made a case for paper money to the British House of Commons.
+As he matured, Franklin began to concern himself more with public affairs. In 1743, he first devised a scheme for the Academy, Charity School, and College of Philadelphia; however, the person he had in mind to run the academy, Rev. Richard Peters, refused and Franklin put his ideas away until 1749 when he printed his own pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He was appointed president of the Academy on November 13, 1749; the academy and the charity school opened in 1751.
+In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking.
+During King George's War, Franklin raised a militia called the Association for General Defense because the legislators of the city had decided to take no action to defend Philadelphia "either by erecting fortifications or building Ships of War." He raised money to create earthwork defenses and buy artillery. The largest of these was the "Association Battery" or "Grand Battery" of 50 guns.
+In 1747, Franklin (already a very wealthy man) retired from printing and went into other businesses. He formed a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop's profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made many new discoveries.
+Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed. In October 1748, he was selected as a councilman; in June 1749, he became a justice of the peace for Philadelphia; and in 1751, he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. On August 10, 1753, he was appointed deputy postmaster-general of British North America. His service in domestic politics included reforming the postal system, with mail sent out every week.
+In 1751, Franklin and Thomas Bond obtained a charter from the Pennsylvania legislature to establish a hospital. Pennsylvania Hospital was the first hospital in the colonies. In 1752, Franklin organized the Philadelphia Contributionship, the Colonies' first homeowner's insurance company.
+Between 1750 and 1753, the "educational triumvirate" of Franklin, Samuel Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, and schoolteacher William Smith built on Franklin's initial scheme and created what Bishop James Madison, president of the College of William & Mary, called a "new-model" plan or style of American college. Franklin solicited, printed in 1752, and promoted an American textbook of moral philosophy by Samuel Johnson, titled Elementa Philosophica, to be taught in the new colleges. In June 1753, Johnson, Franklin, and Smith met in Stratford. They decided the new-model college would focus on the professions, with classes taught in English instead of Latin, have subject matter experts as professors instead of one tutor leading a class for four years, and there would be no religious test for admission. Johnson went on to found King's College (now Columbia University) in New York City in 1754, while Franklin hired Smith as provost of the College of Philadelphia, which opened in 1755. At its first commencement, on May 17, 1757, seven men graduated; six with a Bachelor of Arts and one with a Master of Arts. It was later merged with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to become the University of Pennsylvania. The college was to become influential in guiding the founding documents of the United States: in the Continental Congress, for example, over one-third of the college-affiliated men who contributed to the Declaration of Independence between September 4, 1774, and July 4, 1776, were affiliated with the college.
+In 1754, he headed the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress. This meeting of several colonies had been requested by the Board of Trade in England to improve relations with the Indians and defense against the French. Franklin proposed a broad Plan of Union for the colonies. While the plan was not adopted, elements of it found their way into the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
+In 1753, Harvard University and Yale awarded him honorary master of arts degrees. In 1756, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from the College of William & Mary. Later in 1756, Franklin organized the Pennsylvania Militia. He used Tun Tavern as a gathering place to recruit a regiment of soldiers to go into battle against the Native American uprisings that beset the American colonies.
+
+=== Postmaster ===

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+Well known as a printer and publisher, Franklin was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737, holding the office until 1753, when he and publisher William Hunter were named deputy postmasters–general of British North America, the first to hold the office. (Joint appointments were standard at the time, for political reasons.) He was responsible for the British colonies from Pennsylvania north and east, as far as the island of Newfoundland. A post office for local and outgoing mail had been established in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by local stationer Benjamin Leigh, on April 23, 1754, but service was irregular. Franklin opened the first post office to offer regular, monthly mail in Halifax on December 9, 1755. Meantime, Hunter became postal administrator in Williamsburg, Virginia, and oversaw areas south of Annapolis, Maryland. Franklin reorganized the service's accounting system and improved speed of delivery between Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By 1761, efficiencies led to the first profits for the colonial post office.
+When the lands of New France were ceded to the British under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the British province of Quebec was created among them, and Franklin saw mail service expanded between Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, and New York. For the greater part of his appointment, he lived in England (from 1757 to 1762, and again from 1764 to 1774)—about three-quarters of his term. Eventually, his sympathies for the rebel cause in the American Revolution led to his dismissal on January 31, 1774.
+On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Post Office and named Franklin as the first United States postmaster general. He had been a postmaster for decades and was a natural choice for the position. He had just returned from England and was appointed chairman of a Committee of Investigation to establish a postal system. The report of the committee, providing for the appointment of a postmaster general for the 13 American colonies, was considered by the Continental Congress on July 25 and 26. On July 26, 1775, Franklin was appointed postmaster general, the first appointed under the Continental Congress. His apprentice, William Goddard, felt that his ideas were mostly responsible for shaping the postal system and that the appointment should have gone to him, but he graciously conceded it to Franklin, 36 years his senior. Franklin, however, appointed Goddard as Surveyor of the Posts, issued him a signed pass, and directed him to investigate and inspect the various post offices and mail routes as he saw fit. The newly established postal system became the United States Post Office, a system that continues to operate today.
+
+==== Political work ====
+
+In 1757, he was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a colonial agent to protest against the political influence of the Penn family, the proprietors of the colony. He remained there for five years, striving to end the proprietors' prerogative to overturn legislation from the elected Assembly and their exemption from paying taxes on their land. His lack of influential allies in Whitehall led to the failure of this mission.
+At this time, many members of the Pennsylvania Assembly were feuding with William Penn's heirs, who controlled the colony as proprietors. After his return to the colony, Franklin led the "anti-proprietary party" in the struggle against the Penn family and was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in May 1764. His call for a change from proprietary to royal government was a rare political miscalculation, however: Pennsylvanians worried that such a move would endanger their political and religious freedoms. Because of these fears and because of political attacks on his character, Franklin lost his seat in the October 1764 Assembly elections. The anti-proprietary party dispatched him to England again to continue the struggle against the Penn family proprietorship. During this trip, events drastically changed the nature of his mission.
+In London, Franklin opposed the 1765 Stamp Act. Unable to prevent its passage, he made another political miscalculation and recommended a friend, John Hughes, to the post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were outraged, believing that he had supported the measure all along, and threatened to destroy his home in Philadelphia. Franklin soon learned of the extent of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, and he testified during the House of Commons proceedings that led to its repeal. With this, Franklin suddenly emerged as the leading spokesman for American interests in England. He wrote popular essays on behalf of the colonies. Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts also appointed him as their agent to the Crown.
+During his lengthy missions to London between 1757 and 1775, Franklin lodged in a house on Craven Street, just off the Strand in central London. During his stays there, he developed a close friendship with his landlady, Margaret Stevenson, and her circle of friends and relations, in particular, her daughter Mary, who was more often known as Polly. The house is now a museum known as the Benjamin Franklin House. Whilst in London, Franklin became involved in radical politics. He belonged to a gentlemen's club (which he called "the honest Whigs"), which held stated meetings, and included members such as Richard Price, the minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church who ignited the Revolution controversy, and Andrew Kippis.

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+==== Scientific work ====
+In 1756, Franklin had become a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (now the Royal Society of Arts), which had been founded in 1754. After his return to the United States in 1775, he became the Society's Corresponding Member, continuing a close connection. The Royal Society of Arts instituted a Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1956 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his birth and the 200th anniversary of his membership of the RSA.
+The study of natural philosophy (referred today as science in general) drew him into overlapping circles of acquaintance. Franklin was, for example, a corresponding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. In 1759, the University of St Andrews awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his accomplishments. In October 1759, he was granted Freedom of the Borough of St Andrews. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1762. Because of these honors, he was often addressed as "Dr. Franklin."
+While living in London in 1768, he developed a phonetic alphabet in A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. This reformed alphabet discarded six letters he regarded as redundant (c, j, q, w, x, and y), and substituted six new letters for sounds he felt lacked letters of their own. This alphabet never caught on, and he eventually lost interest.
+
+=== Return to London and Travels in Europe ===
+From the mid-1750s to the mid-1770s, Franklin returned to England and spent much of his time in London., using the city as a base from which to travel. In 1771, he made short journeys through different parts of England, staying with Joseph Priestley at Leeds, Thomas Percival at Manchester and Erasmus Darwin at Lichfield. In Scotland, he spent five days with Lord Kames near Stirling and stayed for three weeks with David Hume in Edinburgh. In 1759, he visited Edinburgh with his son and later reported that he considered his six weeks in Scotland "six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life."
+In Ireland, he stayed with Lord Hillsborough. Franklin noted of him that "all the plausible behaviour I have described is meant only, by patting and stroking the horse, to make him more patient, while the reins are drawn tighter, and the spurs set deeper into his sides." In Dublin, Franklin was invited to sit with the members of the Irish Parliament rather than in the gallery. He was the first American to receive this honor. While touring Ireland, he was deeply moved by the level of poverty he witnessed. The economy of the Kingdom of Ireland was affected by the same trade regulations and laws that governed the Thirteen Colonies. He feared that the American colonies could eventually come to the same level of poverty if the regulations and laws continued to apply to them.
+Franklin spent two months in German lands in 1766, but his connections to the country stretched across a lifetime. He declared a debt of gratitude to German scientist Otto von Guericke for his early studies of electricity. Franklin also co-authored the first treaty of friendship between Prussia and America in 1785. In September 1767, he visited Paris with his usual traveling partner, Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet. News of his electrical discoveries was widespread in France. His reputation meant that he was introduced to many influential scientists and politicians, and also to King Louis XV.
+
+=== Defending the American cause ===
+One line of argument in Parliament was that Americans should pay a share of the costs of the French and Indian War and therefore taxes should be levied on them. Franklin became the American spokesman in highly publicized testimony in Parliament in 1766. He stated that Americans already contributed heavily to the defense of the Empire. He said local governments had raised, outfitted and paid 25,000 soldiers to fight France—as many as Great Britain itself sent—and spent many millions from American treasuries doing so in the French and Indian War alone.
+In 1772, Franklin obtained private letters of Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, governor and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, proving that they had encouraged the Crown to crack down on Bostonians. Franklin sent them to North America, where they escalated tensions. The letters were finally leaked to the public in the Boston Gazette in mid-June 1773, causing a political firestorm in Massachusetts and raising significant questions in England. The British began to regard him as the fomenter of serious trouble. Hopes for a peaceful solution ended as he was systematically ridiculed and humiliated by Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn, before the Privy Council on January 29, 1774. He returned to Philadelphia in March 1775, and abandoned his accommodationist stance.
+In 1773, Franklin published two of his most celebrated pro-American satirical essays: "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One", and "An Edict by the King of Prussia."
+
+=== Agent for British and Hellfire Club membership ===
+Franklin is known to have occasionally attended the Hellfire Club's meetings during 1758 as a non-member during his time in England. However, some authors and historians would argue he was in fact a British spy. As there are no records left (having been burned in 1774), many of these members are just assumed or linked by letters sent to each other. One early proponent that Franklin was a member of the Hellfire Club and a double agent is the historian Donald McCormick, who has a history of making controversial claims.

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+
+=== Coming of revolution ===
+In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania from England for the first time, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize a local militia to defend the capital against the mob. He met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse. Franklin wrote a scathing attack against the racial prejudice of the Paxton Boys. "If an Indian injures me", he asked, "does it follow that I may revenge that injury on all Indians?"
+He provided an early response to British surveillance through his own network of counter-surveillance and manipulation. "He waged a public relations campaign, secured secret aid, played a role in privateering expeditions, and churned out effective and inflammatory propaganda."
+
+=== Declaration of Independence ===
+
+By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, after his second mission to Great Britain, the American Revolution had begun at the Battles of Lexington and Concord the previous month, on April 19, 1775. The New England militia had forced the main British army to remain inside Boston. The Pennsylvania Assembly unanimously chose Franklin as their delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In June 1776, he was appointed a member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Although he was temporarily disabled by gout and unable to attend most meetings of the committee, he made several "small but important" changes to the draft sent to him by Thomas Jefferson.
+The "all hang together" saying ascribed to Franklin at the signing is probably apocryphal. He reportedly replied to John Hancock when Hancock stated that they must all hang together, "Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Carl Van Doren in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiographical Writings writes that the person who said this was most likely Richard Penn, former governor of Pennsylvania, replying to a member of Congress who had said "they must all hang together"... 'If you do not, gentlemen,' said Mr. Penn, 'I can tell you that you will be very apt to hang separately.'"
+
+=== Ambassador to France (1776–1785) ===
+
+On October 26, 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. He took with him as secretary his 16-year-old grandson, William Temple Franklin. They lived in a home in the Parisian suburb of Passy, donated by Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, who supported the United States. Franklin remained in France until 1785. He conducted the affairs of his country toward the French nation with great success, which included securing a critical military alliance in 1778, signing the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and spearheading various clandestine operations against the British, including the privateer activities of John Paul Jones.
+Among his associates in France was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau—a French Revolutionary writer, orator and statesman who in 1791 was elected president of the National Assembly. In July 1784, Franklin met with Mirabeau and contributed anonymous materials that the Frenchman used in his first signed work: Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus. The publication was critical of the Society of the Cincinnati, established in the United States. Franklin and Mirabeau thought of it as a "noble order", inconsistent with the egalitarian ideals of the new republic.
+During his stay in France, he was active as a Freemason, serving as venerable master of the lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 until 1781. In 1784, when Franz Mesmer began to publicize his theory of "animal magnetism" which was considered offensive by many, Louis XVI appointed a commission to investigate it. These included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Franklin. In doing so, the committee concluded, through blind trials that mesmerism only seemed to work when the subjects expected it, which discredited mesmerism and became the first major demonstration of the placebo effect, which was described at that time as "imagination." In 1781, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
+Franklin's advocacy for religious tolerance in France contributed to arguments made by French philosophers and politicians that resulted in Louis XVI's signing of the Edict of Versailles in November 1787. This edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau, which had denied non-Catholics civil status and the right to openly practice their faith.
+Franklin also served as American minister to Sweden, although he never visited that country. He negotiated a treaty that was signed in April 1783. On August 27, 1783, in Paris, he witnessed the world's first hydrogen balloon flight. Le Globe, created by professor Jacques Charles and Les Frères Robert, was watched by a vast crowd as it rose from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). Franklin became so enthusiastic that he subscribed financially to the next project to build a manned hydrogen balloon. On December 1, 1783, Franklin was seated in the special enclosure for honored guests it took off from the Jardin des Tuileries, piloted by Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert. Walter Isaacson describes a chess game between Franklin and the Duchess of Bourbon, "who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. 'Ah,' said the duchess, 'we do not take Kings so.' Replied Franklin in a famous quip: 'We do in America.'"
+
+=== Return to North America ===

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+When he returned home in 1785, Franklin occupied a position second only to that of George Washington as the champion of American independence. Le Ray honored him with a commissioned portrait painted by Joseph Duplessis, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. After his return, Franklin became an abolitionist and freed his two slaves. He eventually became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
+
+==== President of Pennsylvania and Delegate to the Constitutional convention ====
+Special balloting conducted October 18, 1785, unanimously elected him the sixth president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, replacing John Dickinson. The office was practically that of the governor. He held that office for slightly over three years, longer than any other, and served the constitutional limit of three full terms. Shortly after his initial election, he was re-elected to a full term on October 29, 1785, and again in the fall of 1786 and on October 31, 1787. In that capacity, he served as host to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.
+He also served as a delegate to the Convention. It was primarily an honorary position and he seldom engaged in debate.
+According to James McHenry, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Franklin what kind of government they had wrought. He replied: "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
+
+== Death ==
+
+Franklin suffered from obesity throughout his middle age and elder years, which resulted in multiple health problems, including gout, which worsened as he aged. In poor health during the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, he was rarely seen in public after then until his death.
+Franklin died from pleuritic attack at his home in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84. His last reported words, conveyed to his daughter, were, "a dying man can do nothing easy", after she suggested that he change position in bed and lie on his side so he could breathe more easily. Franklin's death is described in the book The Life of Benjamin Franklin, quoting from the account of John Paul Jones:
+
+... when the pain and difficulty of breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of his recovery, when an imposthume, which had formed itself in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had power; but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed; a calm, lethargic state succeeded; and on the 17th instant (April 1790), about eleven o'clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.
+Approximately 20,000 people attended Franklin's funeral, after which he was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia. Upon learning of his death, the Constitutional Assembly in Revolutionary France entered into a state of mourning for a period of three days, and memorial services were conducted in honor of Franklin throughout the country.
+In 1728, at age 22, Franklin wrote what he hoped would be his own epitaph:
+
+The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author.
+Franklin's actual grave, however, as he specified in his final will, simply reads "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin."
+
+== Inventions and scientific inquiries ==
+Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter. He never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
+
+=== Electricity, light ===

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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:16.447701+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Franklin was, along with his contemporary Leonhard Euler, the only major scientist who supported Christiaan Huygens's wave theory of light, which was basically ignored by the rest of the scientific community. In the 18th century, Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory was held to be true; it took Thomas Young's well-known slit experiment in 1803 to persuade most scientists to believe Huygens's theory.
+Franklin started exploring the phenomenon of electricity in the 1740s, after he met the itinerant lecturer Archibald Spencer, who used static electricity in his demonstrations. He proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same "fluid" under different pressures. (The same proposal was made independently that same year by William Watson.) He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively, which replaced the then current distinction made between 'vitreous' and 'resinous' electricity, and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge. In 1748, he constructed a multiple plate capacitor, that he called an "electrical battery" (not a true battery like Volta's pile) by placing eleven panes of glass sandwiched between lead plates, suspended with silk cords and connected by wires.
+In pursuit of more pragmatic uses for electricity, remarking in spring 1749 that he felt "chagrin'd a little" that his experiments had heretofore resulted in "Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind", Franklin planned a practical demonstration. He proposed a dinner party where a turkey was to be killed via electric shock and roasted on an electrical spit. After having prepared several turkeys this way, he noted that "the birds kill'd in this manner eat uncommonly tender." Franklin recounted that in the process of one of these experiments, he was shocked by a pair of Leyden jars, resulting in numbness in his arms that persisted for one evening, noting "I am Ashamed to have been Guilty of so Notorious a Blunder."
+Franklin briefly investigated electrotherapy, including the use of the electric bath. This work led to the field becoming widely known. In recognition of his work with electricity, he received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753, and in 1756, he became one of the few 18th-century Americans elected a fellow of the Society. The CGS unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.
+Franklin advised Harvard University in its acquisition of new electrical laboratory apparatus after the complete loss of its original collection, in a fire that destroyed the original Harvard Hall in 1764. The collection he assembled later became part of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, now on public display in its Science Center.
+
+==== Kite experiment and lightning rod ====
+
+Franklin published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot-tall (12 m) iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15, 1752, Franklin may possibly have conducted his well-known kite experiment in Philadelphia, successfully extracting sparks from a cloud. He described the experiment in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, on October 19, 1752, without mentioning that he himself had performed it. This account was read to the Royal Society on December 21 and printed as such in the Philosophical Transactions. Joseph Priestley published an account with additional details in his 1767 History and Present Status of Electricity. Franklin was careful to stand on an insulator, keeping dry under a roof to avoid the danger of electric shock. Others, such as Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Russia, were indeed electrocuted in performing lightning experiments during the months immediately following his experiment.
+In his writings, Franklin indicates that he was aware of the dangers and offered alternative ways to demonstrate that lightning was electrical, as shown by his use of the concept of electrical ground. He did not perform this experiment in the way that is often pictured in popular literature, flying the kite and waiting to be struck by lightning, as it would have been dangerous. Instead he used the kite to collect some electric charge from a storm cloud, showing that lightning was electrical. On October 19, 1752, in a letter to England with directions for repeating the experiment, he wrote:

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+---
+title: "Carlo Fornasini"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Fornasini"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:09.307260+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Cavaliere dottore Carlo Fornasini (3 November 1854 – 24 December 1931) was an Italian micropalaeontologist who specialised in Foraminifera ('forams'). He was a pioneer in using fossil forams to sequence marine sedimentary deposits by their relative dates; a technique called biostratigraphy.
+
+
+== Biography ==
+He was the third son of Francesco Fornasini, a medical doctor, and his wife Carlotta (née Ferraresi).
+He studied natural sciences at the University of Bologna, under the guidance of Giovanni Capellini (1833-1922), the Professor of Geology there. In 1877, he graduated with honours as dottore (in effect, PhD), on the basis of a thesis which argued from the sequence of the fossil record that certain chalks, marls and clays in the Savena valley near Bologna dated from the Pliocene (5.3-2.6 Ma) rather than, as had previously been thought (including by Capellini), from the Miocene (23.0-5.3 Ma). That same year, Capellini published a paper about this discovery which relegated Fornasini's contribution to that of an assistant and which passed off Fornasini's conclusions as his own. That sort of behaviour has become unacceptable. In 1928, Michele Gortani (1883-1966), who had succeeded Capellini as Professor of Geology, wrote that "the Master had deprived his most promising student, Carlo Fornasini, of the pleasure and pride of announcing his discovery [...] and the results of his studies" (Italian: il Maestro aveva portato via al suo più promettente scolaro, Carlo Fornasini, il piacere e il vanto di annunciare la scoperta [...] e i risultati dello studio). Furthermore, Capellini may not have properly understood Fornasini's ideas. This affair may explain why Fornasini published nothing for the next four years.
+In 1881, Fornasini returned to palaeontology, possibly persuaded by his friend Lodovico Foresti (1829-1913, assistente (assistant) at the Museo Geologico in Bologna). In September and October 1881, he helped to organise, and he attended, the 2nd International Geological Congress in Bologna, which settled important international questions of nomenclature, standardisation and cooperation. When the Italian Geological Society was founded in Bologna during the Congress, under the leadership of Giuseppe Meneghini (1811-1889) and Capellini, he was one of the original members. He remained a member until at least 1922, and between 1883 and 1903 served several times as deputy secretary and as a member of its council. In 1883, he was appointed cavaliere (knight) in the Order of the Crown of Italy. In 1884, he became a corresponding member of the Reale Accademia del Poggio (nowadays, Accademia valdarnese del Poggio), Montevarchi. In 1885, he was one of the secretaries at the 3rd International Congress in Berlin; and in 1888, also at the 4th International Congress in London. In 1889, he was made an honorary member of the Reale Accademia delle scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. From 1894 until 1910, he was an amministratore (director) of the Accademia in Bologna. In 1895, he was appointed assistente at the Museo Geologico, and in 1903 its conservatore (curator). In 1895, Fornasani and Vittorio Simonelli (1860-1929) founded the journal Rivista italiana di paleontologia ('Italian Review of Palaeontology'). Fornasini was no longer one of the principal editors after 1896, but he is named on the title page as a collaboratore (collaborator, or co-worker, or contributing editor) until 1904. In 1900 he joined the Accademia degli Zelanti of Acireale, Sicily as a corresponding member. Poor health forced him to give up his scientific work by 1911. He nevertheless maintained an interest in his speciality, and donated his library and his collection of specimens to the Museo Geologico.
+He married Emilia Erhardt (at a date not determined), and they had two children: Carlo Francesco, a son, and Elsa, a daughter. He was mayor of Poggio Renatico, a comune (municipality) about 30 km (19 mi) northeast of Bologna, for almost 30 years. In 1902, he donated to Poggio Renatico the land on which the church of San Michele (Saint Michael) now stands.
+He is commemorated by a bronze plaque in the Museo Geologico.
+
+
+== Scientific work ==
+His main interest was always Foraminifera, on which he became a world authority. He worked mostly as an amateur scientist, independent of academic institutions.
+He published chiefly in the journals (dates of earliest and latest papers in parentheses) Bollettino della Società geologica italiana (1883-1905), Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna (1889-1908), and Rivista italiana di paleontologia (1896-1903). He published more than sixty papers in those journals. They include a series of ten papers in Memorie entitled "Contributo alla conoscenza della Microfauna terziaria Italiana" ('Contribution to the Knowledge of Italian Microfauna of the Tertiary') (1889-1899), in which he attempted a critical analysis of all available information on the subject. That included identifying synonymy, where two or more scientists had unknowingly described the same species as new to science; an area of study as important in the advancement of taxonomy as the description of new species.
+The WoRMS database lists 78 species of Foraminifera described by him, all between 1883 and 1902. Some of those species have been reclassified into other genera. That is a commonplace occurrence in biology, if a later researcher either revises a genus, or describes a new genus and moves that species into it. However, the fact that as of 2019 Fornasini is still credited as taxonomic authority for 77 of those 78 species shows that he was a careful, accurate and knowledgeable observer.
+
+
+== Eponyms ==
+The WoRMS database lists 18 species of Foraminifera whose specific epithet includes 'fornasini', all described between 1893 and 1948. They were most likely named in honour of Carlo Fornasini, but it would be necessary to consult the original descriptions to be certain.
+
+
+== Fondazione Dott. Carlo Fornasini ==
+In 1964, his son Carlo Francesco donated land and money in his will to set up in his father's memory the Fondazione Dott. Carlo Fornasini at Poggio Renatico. Its original aim was to encourage research into human organ transplantation, later expanded to the more general topic of social and human sciences, with particular regard to ethics and bioethics.
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+"Title and author not determined". Rendiconto delle Sessioni della Reale Accademia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. 36: 37–47. 1931–32.
+Gortani, Michele (1932). "Carlo Fornasini (1854-1931)". Bollettino della Societa Geologica Italiana (in Italian). 51: 35–43. Obituary by Michele Gortani (1883-1966), Professor of Geology at the University of Bologna.
+Arnim, Max (1952). International Personalbibliographie 1800-1943 (in German) (2nd ed.). Stuttgart. p. 387.{{cite book}}:  CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
+Gortani, M. (1963). "Italian Pioneers in Geology and Mineralogy". Journal of World History. 7 (2): 503–519.
+Sarjeant, William A. S. (September 1980). Geologists and the History of Geology. An International Bibliography from the Origins to 1978. Vol. 2. Krieger Publishing Company. p. 1024. ISBN 978-0333293935.
+
+
+== External links ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin-0.md

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+---
+title: "Charles Darwin"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:05.516999+00:00"
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+
+Charles Robert Darwin ( DAR-win; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept. In a joint presentation with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.
+Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped Robert Edmond Grant to investigate marine invertebrates. His studies at the University of Cambridge's Christ's College from 1828 to 1831 encouraged his passion for natural science. However, it was his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836 that truly established Darwin as an eminent geologist. The observations and theories he developed during his voyage supported Charles Lyell's concept of gradual geological change. Publication of his journal of the voyage made Darwin famous as a popular author. His first scientific work was The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842). Along with his work on barnacles, it won him the Royal Medal in 1853.
+Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and, in 1838, devised his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research, and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting the immediate joint submission of both their theories to the Linnean Society of London. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of natural diversification. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in On the Origin of Species (1859). He explored coevolution in Fertilisation of Orchids (1862) and human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) was an early work of psychology, and one of the first books to feature photographs. His final book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881).
+By the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many initially favoured  competing explanations that gave only a minor role to natural selection. It was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. Darwin's discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the unity and diversity of life.
+
+== Biography ==
+
+=== Early life and education ===
+
+Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at his family's home, The Mount, in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood). His grandfathers Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood were both prominent abolitionists. Erasmus Darwin had praised general concepts of evolution and common descent in his Zoonomia (1794), a poetic fantasy of gradual creation including undeveloped ideas anticipating concepts his grandson expanded.

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+---
+title: "Charles Darwin"
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+
+Both families were largely Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, a freethinker, had baby Charles baptised in November 1809 in the Anglican St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury, but Charles and his siblings attended the local Unitarian Church with their mother. The eight-year-old Charles already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus in attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder.
+Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat impoverished people in Shropshire, before going to the well-regarded University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. Darwin found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so he neglected his studies. He learned taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions from John Edmonstone, a Black Briton from Demerara in the South American rainforest, who had been taught there by Charles Waterton, and when brought to Scotland was freed from slavery.
+In Darwin's second year at the university, he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural-history group featuring lively debates in which radical democratic students with materialistic views challenged orthodox religious concepts of science. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, and on 27 March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech.
+One day, Grant praised Lamarck's evolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished by Grant's audacity, but had recently read similar ideas in his grandfather Erasmus' journals. Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jameson's natural-history course, which covered geology – including the debate between neptunism and plutonism. He learned the classification of plants. He assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time.
+Darwin's neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge in January 1828 to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican country parson. Darwin was unqualified for Cambridge's Tripos exams and was required instead to join the ordinary degree course. He preferred riding and shooting to studying. At Cambridge, Darwin joined a society known as the "Glutton Club," which consumed "birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate." Darwin would continue to eat the meat of exotic animals for the rest of his life; on the voyage of the Beagle, he ate puma, iguanas, giant tortoises, armadillos, and mistakenly ate a rhea which he intended to study.
+
+During the first few months of Darwin's enrolment at Christ's College, his second cousin William Darwin Fox was still studying there. Fox impressed him with his butterfly collection, introducing Darwin to entomology and influencing him to pursue beetle collecting. He did this zealously and had some of his finds published in James Francis Stephens' Illustrations of British entomology (1829–1932).
+Through Fox, Darwin became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow. He met other leading parson-naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known to these dons as "the man who walks with Henslow". When his own exams drew near, Darwin applied himself to his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity (1795). In his final examination in January 1831, Darwin did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree.
+Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June 1831. He studied Paley's Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (first published in 1802), which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He read John Herschel's new book, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), which described the highest aim of natural philosophy as understanding such laws through inductive reasoning based on observation, and Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of scientific travels in 1799–1804. Inspired with "a burning zeal" to contribute, Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined Adam Sedgwick's geology course, then on 4 August travelled with him to spend a fortnight mapping strata in Wales.
+
+=== Survey voyage on HMS Beagle ===
+
+After leaving Sedgwick in Wales, Darwin spent a few days with student friends at Barmouth. He returned home on 29 August to find a letter from Henslow proposing him as a suitable (if unfinished) naturalist for a self-funded supernumerary place on HMS Beagle with captain Robert FitzRoy, a position for a gentleman rather than "a mere collector". The ship was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. Robert Darwin objected to his son's planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood II, to agree to (and fund) his son's participation. Darwin took care to remain in a private capacity to retain control over his collection, intending it for a major scientific institution.
+After delays, the voyage began on 27 December 1831; it lasted almost five years. As FitzRoy had intended, Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while HMS Beagle surveyed and charted coasts. He kept careful notes of his observations and theoretical speculations. At intervals during the voyage, his specimens were sent to Cambridge together with letters including a copy of his journal for his family. He had some expertise in geology, beetle collecting and dissecting marine invertebrates, but in all other areas, was a novice and ably collected specimens for expert appraisal. Despite suffering badly from seasickness, Darwin wrote copious notes while on board the ship. Most of his zoology notes are about marine invertebrates, starting with plankton collected during a calm spell.

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+title: "Charles Darwin"
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+category: "reference"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Human society ===
+Darwin's views on social and political issues reflected his time and social position. He grew up in a family of Whig reformers who, like his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, supported electoral reform and the emancipation of slaves. Darwin was passionately opposed to slavery.
+Taking taxidermy lessons in 1826 from the freed slave John Edmonstone, whom Darwin long recalled as "a very pleasant and intelligent man", reinforced his belief that black people shared the same feelings, and could be as intelligent as people of other races. He took the same attitude to native people he met on the Beagle voyage. Though commonplace in Britain at the time, Silliman and Bachman noticed the contrast with slave-owning America. Around twenty years later, racism became a feature of British society, but Darwin remained strongly against slavery, against "ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species", and against ill-treatment of native people.[VII]
+Darwin's interaction with Yaghans (Fuegians) such as Jemmy Button during the second voyage of HMS Beagle had a profound impact on his view of indigenous peoples. At his arrival in Tierra del Fuego, he made a colourful description of "Fuegian savages". This view changed as he came to know the Yaghan people more in detail. By studying the Yaghans, Darwin concluded that a number of basic emotions by different human groups were the same and that mental capabilities were roughly the same as for Europeans. While interested in Yaghan culture, Darwin failed to appreciate their deep ecological knowledge and elaborate cosmology until the 1850s when he inspected a dictionary of Yaghan detailing 32,000 words. He saw that European colonisation would often lead to the extinction of native civilisations, and "tr[ied] to integrate colonialism into an evolutionary history of civilization analogous to natural history".
+Darwin's view of women was that men's eminence over them was the outcome of sexual selection, a view disputed by Antoinette Brown Blackwell in her 1875 book The Sexes Throughout Nature.
+Darwin was intrigued by his half-cousin Francis Galton's argument, introduced in 1865, that statistical analysis of heredity showed that moral and mental human traits could be inherited, and principles of animal breeding could apply to humans. In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that aiding the weak to survive and have families could lose the benefits of natural selection, but cautioned that withholding such aid would endanger the instinct of sympathy, "the noblest part of our nature", and factors such as education could be more important. When Galton suggested that publishing research could encourage intermarriage within a "caste" of "those who are naturally gifted", Darwin foresaw practical difficulties and thought it "the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race", preferring to simply publicise the importance of inheritance and leave decisions to individuals. Francis Galton named this field of study "eugenics" in 1883,[VIII] after Darwin's death, and his theories were cited to promote eugenic policies.
+
+== Evolutionary social movements ==
+
+Darwin's fame and popularity led to his name being associated with ideas and movements that, at times, had only an indirect relation to his writings, and sometimes went directly against his express comments.
+Thomas Malthus had argued that population growth beyond resources was ordained by God to get humans to work productively and show restraint in getting families; this was used in the 1830s to justify workhouses and laissez-faire economics. Evolution was by then seen as having social implications, and Herbert Spencer's 1851 book Social Statics based ideas of human freedom and individual liberties on his Lamarckian evolutionary theory.
+Soon after the Origin was published in 1859, critics derided his description of a struggle for existence as a Malthusian justification for the English industrial capitalism of the time. The term Darwinism was used for the evolutionary ideas of others, including Spencer's "survival of the fittest" as free-market progress, and Ernst Haeckel's polygenistic ideas of human development. Writers used natural selection to argue for various, often contradictory, ideologies such as laissez-faire dog-eat-dog capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. However, Darwin's holistic view of nature included "dependence of one being on another"; thus pacifists, socialists, liberal social reformers and anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin stressed the value of cooperation over struggle within a species. Darwin himself insisted that social policy should not simply be guided by concepts of struggle and selection in nature.
+
+After the 1880s, the eugenics movement developed on ideas of biological inheritance, and for scientific justification of their ideas appealed to some concepts of Darwinism. In Britain, most shared Darwin's cautious views on voluntary improvement and sought to encourage those with good traits in "positive eugenics". During the "Eclipse of Darwinism", a scientific foundation for eugenics was provided by Mendelian genetics. Negative eugenics to remove the "feebleminded" was widely popular across the political spectrum in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Belief in negative eugenics led to the introduction of compulsory sterilisation laws in the United States, followed by several other countries. Subsequently, Nazi eugenics brought the field into disrepute.[VII]
+The term "Social Darwinism" was used infrequently from around the 1890s, but became popular as a derogatory term in the 1940s when used by Richard Hofstadter to attack the laissez-faire conservatism of those like William Graham Sumner who opposed reform and socialism. Since then, it has been used as a term of abuse by those opposed to what they think are the moral consequences of evolution.
+
+== Works ==

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+---
+title: "Charles Darwin"
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:05.516999+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Darwin was a prolific writer. Even without the publication of his works on evolution, he would have had a considerable reputation as the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, as a geologist who had published extensively on South America and had solved the puzzle of the formation of coral atolls, and as a biologist who had published the definitive work on barnacles. While On the Origin of Species dominates perceptions of his work, The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals had considerable impact, and his books on plants including The Power of Movement in Plants were innovative studies of great importance, as was his final work on The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.
+
+== Legacy and commemoration ==
+
+As Alfred Russel Wallace put it, Darwin had "wrought a greater revolution in human thought within a quarter of a century than any man of our time – or perhaps any time", having "given us a new conception of the world of life, and a theory which is itself a powerful instrument of research; has shown us how to combine into one consistent whole the facts accumulated by all the separate classes of workers, and has thereby revolutionised the whole study of nature". The paleoanthropologist Trenton Holliday states that "Darwin is rightly considered to be the preeminent evolutionary scientist of all time". Ernst Mayr considered On the Origin of Species to be, second to the Bible, the second most important book in history with regards to its influence on human thought, and he considered the scientific revolution that Darwin's theory of evolution ushered in to be "perhaps the most fundamental of all the intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind".
+By around 1880, most scientists were convinced of evolution as descent with modification, though few agreed with Darwin that natural selection "has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification". During "the eclipse of Darwinism" scientists explored alternative mechanisms. Then Ronald Fisher incorporated Mendelian genetics in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, leading to population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis, which continues to develop. Scientific discoveries have confirmed and validated Darwin's key insights. The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said that "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
+Geographical features given his name include Darwin Sound and Mount Darwin, both named while he was on the Beagle voyage, and Darwin Harbour, named by his former shipmates on its next voyage, which eventually became the location of Darwin, the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory. Darwin's name was given, formally or informally, to numerous plants and animals, including many he had collected on the voyage. 
+In 1908, the Linnean Society of London began awards of the Darwin–Wallace Medal, to mark fifty years from the joint reading on 1 July 1858 of papers by Darwin and Wallace publishing their theory. Further awards were made in 1958 and 2008; since 2010, the awards have been annual. Darwin College, a postgraduate college at Cambridge University founded in 1964, is named after the Darwin family. From 2000 to 2017, UK £10 banknotes issued by the Bank of England featured Darwin's portrait printed on the reverse, along with a hummingbird and HMS Beagle. Darwin's bicentennial was celebrated with a series of postage stamps in the United Kingdom.
+The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a bronze statue of Charles Darwin in its Deep Time Hall, which features Darwin seated on a bench with a notebook containing his "tree of life" sketch. The statue was sculpted by David Clendining and was installed as the centrepiece of the hall, which focuses on Darwinian evolution.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== Citations ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+
+== External links ==
+
+"The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online". Retrieved 4 March 2024.
+Works by Charles Darwin in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
+Works by Charles Darwin at Project Gutenberg
+Works by or about Charles Robert Darwin at the Internet Archive
+Works by Charles Darwin at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
+The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online – Darwin Online; Darwin's publications, private papers and bibliography, supplementary works including biographies, obituaries and reviews
+Darwin Correspondence Project Full text and notes for complete correspondence to 1867, with summaries of all the rest, and pages of commentary
+Darwin Manuscript Project
+"Archival material relating to Charles Darwin". UK National Archives. 
+View books owned and annotated by Charles Darwin at the online Biodiversity Heritage Library.
+Works by Charles Darwin at the Biodiversity Heritage Library 
+Digitised Darwin Manuscripts in Cambridge Digital Library
+Portraits of Charles Darwin at the National Portrait Gallery, London 
+Newspaper clippings about Charles Darwin in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
+Charles Darwin in the British horticultural press – Occasional Papers from RHS Lindley Library, volume 3 July 2010
+Scientific American, 29 April 1882, pp. 256, Obituary of Charles Darwin
+Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Charles Darwin". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.

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+On their first stop ashore at St Jago in Cape Verde, Darwin found that a white band high in the volcanic rock cliffs included seashells. FitzRoy had given him the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which set out uniformitarian concepts of land slowly rising or falling over immense periods,[II] and Darwin saw things Lyell's way, theorising and thinking of writing a book on geology. When they reached Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the tropical forest, but detested the sight of slavery there, and disputed this issue with FitzRoy.
+The survey continued to the south in Patagonia. They stopped at Bahía Blanca, and in cliffs near Punta Alta, Darwin made a significant find of fossil bones of huge extinct mammals beside modern seashells, indicating recent extinction with no signs of change in climate or catastrophe. He found bony plates like a giant version of the armour on local armadillos. From a jaw and tooth, he identified the gigantic Megatherium, then from Cuvier's description thought the armour was from this animal. The finds were shipped to England, and scientists found the fossils of great interest.
+On rides with gauchos into the interior to explore geology and collect more fossils, Darwin gained social, political, and anthropological insights into both native and colonial people at a time of revolution, and learnt that two types of rhea had separate but overlapping territories. Further south, he saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells as raised beaches at a series of elevations. He read Lyell's second volume and accepted its description of "centres of creation" of species, but his discoveries and theorising challenged Lyell's ideas of smooth continuity and of extinction of species. 
+In Tierra del Fuego, Darwin formed the incorrect belief that the archipelago was devoid of reptiles.
+Three Fuegians on board, who had been seized during the first Beagle voyage and then given Christian education in England, were returning with a missionary. Darwin found them friendly and civilised, yet at Tierra del Fuego he met "miserable, degraded savages", as different as wild from domesticated animals. He remained convinced that, despite this diversity, all humans were interrelated with a shared origin and potential for improvement towards civilisation. Unlike his scientist friends, he now thought there was no unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. A year on, the mission had been abandoned. The Fuegian they had named Jemmy Button lived like the other natives, had a wife, and had no wish to return to England.
+
+Darwin experienced an earthquake in Chile in 1835 and saw signs that the land had just been raised, including mussel beds stranded above high tide. High in the Andes, he saw seashells and several fossil trees that had grown on a sand beach. He theorised that as the land rose, oceanic islands sank, and coral reefs around them grew to form atolls.
+On the geologically new Galápagos Islands, Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "centre of creation". He found mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of tortoise shells showed which island they came from, but failed to collect them, even after eating tortoises taken on board as food. In Australia, the marsupial rat-kangaroo and the platypus seemed so unusual that Darwin thought it was almost as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the Aboriginal Australians "good-humoured & pleasant", their numbers depleted by European settlement.
+FitzRoy investigated how the atolls of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands had formed. The survey supported Darwin's theorising. FitzRoy began writing the official Narrative of the Beagle voyages, and after reading Darwin's diary, he proposed incorporating it into the account. Darwin's Journal was eventually rewritten as a separate third volume, on geology and natural history.
+In Cape Town, South Africa, Darwin and FitzRoy met John Herschel, who had recently written to Lyell praising his uniformitarianism as opening bold speculation on "that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others" as "a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process".
+When organising his notes as the ship sailed home, Darwin wrote that, if his growing suspicions about the mockingbirds, the tortoises and the Falkland Islands fox were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added "would" before "undermine". He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species".
+Without Darwin's knowledge, extracts from his letters to Henslow had been read to scientific societies, printed as a pamphlet for private distribution among members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and reported in magazines, including The Athenaeum. Darwin first heard of this at Cape Town, and at Ascension Island read of Sedgwick's prediction that Darwin "will have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe".
+
+=== Inception of Darwin's evolutionary theory ===

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+On 2 October 1836, Beagle anchored at Falmouth, Cornwall. Darwin promptly made the long coach journey to Shrewsbury to visit his home and see relatives. He then hurried to Cambridge to see Henslow, who advised him on finding available naturalists to catalogue Darwin's animal collections and to take on the botanical specimens. Darwin's father organised investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded gentleman scientist, and an excited Darwin went around the London institutions being fêted and seeking experts to describe the collections. British zoologists at the time had a huge backlog of work, due to the encouragement of natural history collecting throughout the British Empire, and there was a danger of specimens being left in storage.
+Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time on 29 October and soon introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist Richard Owen, who had the facilities of the Royal College of Surgeons to work on the fossil bones collected by Darwin. Owen's surprising results included other gigantic extinct ground sloths as well as the Megatherium Darwin had identified, a near complete skeleton of the unknown Scelidotherium and a hippopotamus-sized rodent-like skull named Toxodon resembling a giant capybara. The armour fragments were actually from Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like creature, as Darwin had initially thought. These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America.
+In mid-December, Darwin took lodgings in Cambridge to arrange expert classification of his collections and prepare his own research for publication. Questions of how to combine his diary into the Narrative were resolved at the end of the month when FitzRoy accepted Broderip's advice to make it a separate volume, and Darwin began work on his Journal and Remarks.
+Darwin's first paper showed that the South American landmass was slowly rising. With Lyell's enthusiastic backing, he read it to the Geological Society of London on 4 January 1837. On the same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the Zoological Society. The ornithologist John Gould soon announced that the Galápagos birds that Darwin had thought a mixture of blackbirds, "gros-beaks" and finches, were, in fact, twelve separate species of finches. On 17 February, Darwin was elected to the Council of the Geological Society, and Lyell's presidential address presented Owen's findings on Darwin's fossils, stressing the geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas.
+
+Early in March, Darwin moved to London to be near this work, joining Lyell's social circle of scientists and experts such as Charles Babbage, who described God as a programmer of laws. Darwin stayed with his freethinking brother Erasmus, part of this Whig circle and a close friend of the writer Harriet Martineau, who promoted the Malthusianism that underpinned the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty. As a Unitarian, she welcomed the radical implications of transmutation of species, promoted by Grant and younger surgeons influenced by Geoffroy. Transmutation was anathema to Anglicans defending social order, but reputable scientists openly discussed the subject. There was broad interest in John Herschel's letter praising Lyell's approach as a way to find a natural cause of the origin of new species.
+Gould met Darwin and told him that the Galápagos mockingbirds from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and what Darwin had thought was a "wren" was in the finch group. Darwin had not labelled the finches by island, but from the notes of others on the ship, including FitzRoy, he allocated species to islands. The two rheas were distinct species, and on 14 March Darwin announced how their distribution changed going southwards.
+By mid-March 1837, barely six months after his return to England, Darwin was speculating in his Red Notebook on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as the strange extinct mammal Macrauchenia, which resembled a giant guanaco, a llama relative. Around mid-July, he recorded in his "B" notebook his thoughts on lifespan and variation across generations – explaining the variations he had observed in Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds, and rheas. He sketched branching descent, and then a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", thereby discarding Lamarck's idea of independent lineages progressing to higher forms.
+
+=== Overwork and illness ===

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+While developing this intensive study of transmutation, Darwin became mired in more work. Still rewriting his Journal, he took on editing and publishing the expert reports on his collections, and with Henslow's help obtained a Treasury grant of £1,000 to sponsor this multi-volume Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, a sum equivalent to about £115,000 in 2021. He stretched the funding to include his planned books on geology, and agreed to unrealistic dates with the publisher. As the Victorian era began, Darwin pressed on with writing his Journal, and in August 1837 began correcting printer's proofs.
+As Darwin worked under pressure, his health suffered. On 20 September, he had "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart", so his doctors urged him to "knock off all work" and live in the country for a few weeks. After visiting Shrewsbury, he joined his Wedgwood relatives at Maer Hall, Staffordshire, but found them too eager for tales of his travels to give him much rest. His charming, intelligent, and cultured cousin Emma Wedgwood, nine months older than Darwin, was nursing his invalid aunt. His uncle Josiah pointed out an area of ground where cinders had disappeared under loam. Darwin suggested that this might have been the work of earthworms, inspiring "a new & important theory" on their role in soil formation, which he presented at the Geological Society on 1 November 1837. His Journal was printed and ready for publication by the end of February 1838, as was the first volume of the Narrative, but FitzRoy was still working hard to finish his own volume.
+William Whewell pushed Darwin to take on the duties of Secretary of the Geological Society. After initially declining the work, he accepted the post in March 1838. Despite the grind of writing and editing the Beagle reports, Darwin made remarkable progress on transmutation, taking every opportunity to question expert naturalists and, unconventionally, people with practical experience in selective breeding such as farmers and pigeon fanciers. Over time, his research drew on information from his relatives and children, the family butler, neighbours, colonists, and former shipmates. He included mankind in his speculations from the outset, and on seeing an orangutan in the zoo on 28 March 1838 noted its childlike behaviour.
+The strain took a toll, and by June, he was being laid up for days on end with stomach problems, headaches, and heart symptoms. For the rest of his life, he was repeatedly incapacitated with episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, palpitations, trembling, and other symptoms, particularly during times of stress, such as attending meetings or making social visits. The cause of Darwin's illness remained unknown, and attempts at treatment had only ephemeral success.
+On 23 June, he took a break and went "geologising" in Scotland. He visited Glen Roy in glorious weather to see the parallel "roads" cut into the hillsides at three heights. He later published his view that these were marine-raised beaches, but then had to accept that they were shorelines of a proglacial lake.
+
+Fully recuperated, he returned to Shrewsbury in July 1838. Used to jotting down daily notes on animal breeding, he scrawled rambling thoughts about marriage, career, and prospects on two scraps of paper, one with columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Advantages under "Marry" included "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow", against points such as "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time". Having decided in favour of marriage, he discussed it with his father, then went to visit his cousin Emma on 29 July. At this time, he did not get around to proposing, but against his father's advice, he mentioned his ideas on transmutation.
+
+=== Malthus and natural selection ===
+Continuing his research in London, Darwin's wide reading now included the sixth edition of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population. On 28 September 1838, he noted its assertion that human "population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio", a geometric progression so that population soon exceeds food supply in what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. Darwin was well-prepared to compare this to Augustin de Candolle's "warring of the species" of plants and the struggle for existence among wildlife, explaining how the numbers of a species remained roughly stable.
+As species always breed beyond available resources, favourable variations would make organisms better at surviving and passing the variations on to their offspring, while unfavourable variations would be lost. He wrote that the "final cause of all this wedging, must be to sort out proper structure, & adapt it to changes", so that "One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones." This would result in the formation of new species. As he later wrote in his Autobiography:

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+In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work...
+By mid-December, Darwin saw a similarity between farmers picking the best stock in selective breeding, and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected", thinking this comparison "a beautiful part of my theory". He later called his theory natural selection, an analogy with what he termed the "artificial selection" of selective breeding.
+On 11 November, he returned to Maer and proposed to Emma, once more telling her his ideas. She accepted, then, in exchanges of loving letters, showed how she valued his openness in sharing their differences, while expressing her strong Unitarian beliefs and concerns that his honest doubts might separate them in the afterlife. While he was house-hunting in London, bouts of illness continued and Emma wrote urging him to get some rest, almost prophetically remarking "So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you." He found what they called "Macaw Cottage" (because of its gaudy interiors) in Gower Street, then moved his "museum" in over Christmas. On 24 January 1839, Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
+On 29 January, Darwin and Emma Wedgwood were married at Maer in an Anglican ceremony arranged to suit the Unitarians, then immediately caught the train to London and their new home.
+
+=== Geology books, barnacles, evolutionary research ===
+
+Darwin now had the framework of his theory of natural selection "by which to work", as his "prime hobby". His research included extensive experimental selective breeding of plants and animals, finding evidence that species were not fixed and investigating many detailed ideas to refine and substantiate his theory. For fifteen years this work was in the background to his main occupation of writing on geology and publishing expert reports on the Beagle collections, in particular, the barnacles. 
+The impetus of Darwin's barnacle research came from a collection of a barnacle colony from Chile in 1835, which he dubbed Mr. Arthrobalanus. His confusion over the relationship of this species (Cryptophialus minutus) to other barnacles caused him to fixate on the systematics of the taxa. He wrote his first examination of the species in 1846, but did not formally describe it until 1854.
+FitzRoy's long-delayed Narrative was published in May 1839. Darwin's Journal and Remarks got good reviews as the third volume, and on 15 August, it was published on its own. Early in 1842, Darwin wrote about his ideas to Charles Lyell, who noted that his ally "denies seeing a beginning to each crop of species".
+Darwin's book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs on his theory of atoll formation was published in May 1842 after more than three years of work, and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. To escape the pressures of London, the family moved to rural Down House in Kent in September. On 11 January 1844, Darwin mentioned his theorising to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing with melodramatic humour "it is like confessing a murder". Hooker replied, "There may, in my opinion, have been a series of productions on different spots, & also a gradual change of species. I shall be delighted to hear how you think that this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on the subject."
+
+By July, Darwin had expanded his "sketch" into a 230-page "Essay", to be expanded with his research results if he died prematurely. In November, the anonymously published sensational best-seller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation brought wide interest in transmutation. Darwin scorned its amateurish geology and zoology, but carefully reviewed his own arguments. Controversy erupted, and it continued to sell well despite contemptuous dismissal by scientists.
+Darwin completed his third geological book in 1846. He now renewed his interest in marine invertebrates and, using expertise from his student days with Grant, dissected and classified the barnacles he had collected on the voyage. He enjoyed observing their beauty and thought about comparisons with allied structures. In 1847, Hooker read the "Essay" and sent notes that provided Darwin with the calm critical feedback that he needed, but would not commit himself and questioned Darwin's opposition to continuing acts of creation.
+In an attempt to improve his chronic ill health, Darwin went in 1849 to Dr. James Gully's Malvern spa and was surprised to find some benefit from hydrotherapy. Then, in 1851, his treasured daughter Annie fell ill, reawakening his fears that his illness might be hereditary. She died the same year after a long series of crises.
+In eight years of work on barnacles, Darwin's theory helped him to find "homologies" showing that slightly changed body parts served different functions to meet new conditions. In some genera he found minute males parasitic on hermaphrodites, showing an intermediate stage in evolution of distinct sexes. In 1853, it earned him the Royal Society's Royal Medal, and it made his reputation as a biologist. Upon the conclusion of his research, Darwin declared, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before." In 1854, he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, gaining postal access to its library. He began a major reassessment of his theory of species, and in November realised that divergence in the character of descendants could be explained by them becoming adapted to "diversified places in the economy of nature".

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+=== Publication of the theory of natural selection ===
+
+By the start of 1856, Darwin was investigating whether eggs and seeds could survive travel across seawater to spread species across oceans. Hooker increasingly doubted the traditional view that species were fixed, but their young friend Thomas Henry Huxley was still firmly against the transmutation of species. Lyell was intrigued by Darwin's speculations without realising their extent. When he read a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace, "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species", he saw similarities with Darwin's thoughts. He urged him to publish to establish precedence.
+Though Darwin saw no threat, on 14 May 1856, he began writing a short paper. Finding answers to difficult questions held him up repeatedly, and he expanded his plans to a "big book on species" titled Natural Selection, which was to include his "note on Man". He continued his research, obtaining information and specimens from naturalists worldwide, including Wallace, who was working in Borneo.
+In mid-1857, he added a section heading, "Theory applied to Races of Man", but did not add text on this topic. On 5 September 1857, Darwin sent the American botanist Asa Gray a detailed outline of his ideas, including an abstract of Natural Selection, which omitted human origins and sexual selection. In December, Darwin received a letter from Wallace asking if the book would examine human origins. He responded that he would avoid that subject, "so surrounded with prejudices", while encouraging Wallace's theorising and adding that "I go much further than you."
+Darwin's book was only partly written when, on 18 June 1858, he received a paper from Wallace describing natural selection. Shocked that he had been "forestalled", Darwin sent it on that day to Lyell, as requested by Wallace. Although Wallace had not asked for publication, Darwin suggested he would send it to any journal that Wallace chose. His family was in crisis, with children in the village dying of scarlet fever, and he put matters in the hands of his friends.
+After some discussion, with no reliable way of involving Wallace, Lyell and Hooker decided on a joint presentation at the Linnean Society on 1 July of On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. On the evening of 28 June, Darwin's baby son died of scarlet fever after almost a week of severe illness, and he was too distraught to attend.
+There was little immediate attention to this announcement of the theory; the president of the Linnean Society remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Only one review rankled enough for Darwin to recall it later; Professor Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that "all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old". Darwin struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his "big book", suffering from ill health but getting constant encouragement from his scientific friends. Lyell arranged to have it published by John Murray.
+On the Origin of Species proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859. In the book, Darwin set out "one long argument" of detailed observations, inferences and consideration of anticipated objections. In making the case for common descent, he included evidence of homologies between humans and other mammals.[III] Having outlined sexual selection, he hinted that it could explain differences between human races.[IV] He avoided explicit discussion of human origins, but implied the significance of his work with the sentence; "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."[IV] His theory is simply stated in the introduction:
+
+As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
+At the end of the book, he concluded that:
+
+There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
+The last word was the only variant of "evolved" in the first five editions of the book. "Evolutionism" at that time was associated with other concepts, most commonly with embryological development. Darwin first used the word evolution in The Descent of Man in 1871, before adding it in 1872 to the 6th edition of The Origin of Species.
+
+=== Responses to publication ===

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+The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular and less scientific Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Though Darwin's illness kept him away from the public debates, he eagerly scrutinised the scientific response, commenting on press cuttings, reviews, articles, satires and caricatures, and corresponded on it with colleagues worldwide. The book did not explicitly discuss human origins,[IV] but included a number of hints about the animal ancestry of humans from which the inference could be made. Upon reading it, Huxley remarked "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"
+The first review asked, "If a monkey has become a man – what may not a man become?" It said this should be left to theologians as being too dangerous for ordinary readers. Among early favourable responses, Huxley's reviews swiped at Richard Owen, leader of the scientific establishment which Huxley was trying to overthrow.
+In April, Owen's review attacked Darwin's friends and condescendingly dismissed his ideas, angering Darwin, but Owen and others began to promote ideas of supernaturally guided evolution. Patrick Matthew drew attention to his 1831 book, which had a brief appendix suggesting a concept of natural selection leading to new species, but he had not developed the idea.
+The Church of England's response was mixed. Darwin's old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". In 1860, the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin. Its ideas, including higher criticism, were attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued that miracles broke God's laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and praised "Mr Darwin's masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature".
+Asa Gray discussed teleology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Gray's pamphlet on theistic evolution, Natural Selection is not inconsistent with natural theology. The most famous confrontation was at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin's explanation and human descent from apes. Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxley's legendary retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his gifts, came to symbolise a triumph of science over religion.
+
+Even Darwin's close friends Gray, Hooker, Huxley, and Lyell still expressed various reservations but gave strong support, as did many others, particularly younger naturalists. Gray and Lyell sought reconciliation with faith, while Huxley portrayed a polarisation between religion and science. He campaigned pugnaciously against the authority of the clergy in education, aiming to overturn the dominance of clergymen and aristocratic amateurs under Owen in favour of a new generation of professional scientists. Owen's claim that brain anatomy proved humans to be a separate biological order from apes was shown to be false by Huxley in a long-running dispute parodied by Kingsley as the "Great Hippocampus Question", and discredited Owen.
+In response to objections that the origin of life was unexplained, Darwin pointed to acceptance of Newton's law even though the cause of gravity was unknown. Despite criticisms and reservations related to this topic, he nevertheless proposed a prescient idea in an 1871 letter to Hooker in which he suggested the origin of life may have occurred in a "warm little pond".
+Darwinism became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863, Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later, Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature showed that anatomically, humans are apes. Then, The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates provided empirical evidence of natural selection. 
+Following the publication of The Origin of Species, both Prince Albert, who supported Darwin's ideas, and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, recommended Darwin for a knighthood but without success; among the opponents of the proposed honour was Bishop Wilberforce.
+Later lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential "X Club" devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas". By the end of the 1860s, most scientists agreed that evolution occurred, but only a minority supported Darwin's view that the chief mechanism was natural selection.
+The Origin of Species was translated into many languages, becoming a staple scientific text attracting thoughtful attention from all walks of life, including the "working men" who flocked to Huxley's lectures. Darwin's theory resonated with various movements at the time[V] and became a key fixture of popular culture.[VI] Cartoonists parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain, these droll images served to popularise Darwin's theory in an unthreatening way. Darwin had started growing a beard during illness in 1862. After he reappeared in public in 1866, caricatures of him as an ape helped to identify all forms of evolutionism with Darwinism.
+Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, was the first to provide solid fossil evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by unearthing the ancestors of the modern horse.  In 1877, Marsh delivered a very influential speech before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, providing a demonstrative argument for evolution.  For the first time, Marsh traced the evolution of vertebrates from fish all the way through humans.  Sparing no detail, he listed a wealth of fossil examples of past life forms.  The significance of this speech was immediately recognized by the scientific community, and it was printed in its entirety in several scientific journals.
+
+=== Descent of Man, sexual selection, and botany ===

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+---
+
+Despite repeated bouts of illness during the last twenty-two years of his life, Darwin's work continued. Having published On the Origin of Species as an abstract of his theory, he pressed on with experiments, research, and writing of his "big book". He covered human descent from earlier animals, including the evolution of society and of mental abilities, as well as explaining decorative beauty in wildlife and diversifying into innovative plant studies.
+Enquiries about insect pollination led in 1861 to novel studies of wild orchids, showing adaptation of their flowers to attract specific moths to each species and ensure  cross-fertilisation. In 1862, Fertilisation of Orchids gave his first detailed demonstration of the power of natural selection to explain complex ecological relationships, making testable predictions. Explorers in Madagascar had discovered an orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, with a sixteen-inch-long nectary. Darwin predicted the existence of a moth with a proboscis long enough to pollinate it; the pollen "would not be withdrawn until some huge moth, with a wonderfully long proboscis, tried to drain the last drop." Explorers in Madagascar discovered Xanthopan in 1903. As his health declined, he lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants. Admiring visitors included Ernst Haeckel, a zealous proponent of Darwinism incorporating Lamarckism and Goethe's idealism. Wallace remained supportive, though he increasingly turned to Spiritualism.
+Darwin's book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) was the first part of his planned "big book", and included his unsuccessful hypothesis of pangenesis attempting to explain heredity. It sold briskly at first, despite its size, and was translated into many languages. He wrote most of a second part, on natural selection, but it remained unpublished in his lifetime.
+Lyell had already popularised human prehistory, and Huxley had shown that anatomically humans are apes. With The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex published in 1871, Darwin set out evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes, and presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock's plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial classification, while emphasising that humans are all one species.
+
+His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the behaviour of animals. Both books proved very popular, and Darwin was impressed by the general assent with which his views had been received, remarking that "everybody is talking about it without being shocked." His conclusion was "that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
+His evolution-related experiments and investigations led to books on Insectivorous Plants, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, different forms of flowers on plants of the same species, and The Power of Movement in Plants. He continued to collect information and exchange views from scientific correspondents all over the world, including Mary Treat, whom he encouraged to persevere in her scientific work. He was the first person to recognise the significance of carnivory in plants. His botanical work[IX] was interpreted and popularised by various writers including Grant Allen and H. G. Wells, and helped transform plant science in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
+
+=== Death and funeral ===
+
+In 1882, Darwin was diagnosed with what was called "angina pectoris" which then meant coronary thrombosis and disease of the heart. At the time of his death, the physicians diagnosed "anginal attacks" and "heart-failure"; there has since been scholarly speculation about his life-long health issues.
+Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882, aged 73. His last words were to his family, telling Emma, "I am not the least afraid of death—Remember what a good wife you have been to me—Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me". While she rested, he repeatedly told Henrietta and Francis, "It's almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you".
+He had expected to be buried in St Mary's churchyard at Downe, but at the request of Darwin's colleagues, after public and parliamentary petitioning, William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society) arranged for Darwin to be honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. The funeral, held on Wednesday, 26 April, was attended by thousands of people, including family, friends, scientists, philosophers, and dignitaries.
+
+== Children ==
+
+The Darwins had ten children: two died in infancy, and Annie's death at the age of ten had a devastating effect on her parents. Charles was a devoted father and uncommonly attentive to his children. Whenever they fell ill, he feared that they might have inherited weaknesses from inbreeding due to the close family ties he shared with his wife and cousin, Emma Wedgwood. He examined inbreeding in his writings, contrasting it with the advantages of outcrossing in many species.

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+---
+title: "Charles Darwin"
+chunk: 10/12
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:05.516999+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Charles Waring Darwin, born in December 1856, was the tenth and last of the children. Emma Darwin was aged 48 at the time of the birth, and the child was mentally subnormal and never learnt to walk or talk. He probably had Down syndrome, which had not then been medically described. The evidence is a photograph by William Erasmus Darwin of the infant and his mother, showing a characteristic head shape, and the family's observations of the child. Charles Waring died of scarlet fever on 28 June 1858, when Darwin wrote in his journal: "Poor dear Baby died." 
+Of his surviving children, George, Francis and Horace became Fellows of the Royal Society, distinguished as an astronomer, botanist and civil engineer, respectively. All three were knighted. Another son, Leonard, went on to be a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist, and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.
+
+== Views and opinions ==
+
+=== Religious views ===
+
+Darwin's family tradition was nonconformist Unitarianism, while his father and grandfather were freethinkers, and his baptism and boarding school were Church of England. When going to Cambridge to become an Anglican clergyman, he did not "in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible". He learned John Herschel's science which, like William Paley's natural theology, sought explanations in laws of nature rather than miracles and saw adaptation of species as evidence of design. On board HMS Beagle, Darwin was quite orthodox and would quote the Bible as an authority on morality. He looked for "centres of creation" to explain distribution, and suggested that the very similar antlions found in Australia and England were evidence of a divine hand.
+
+Upon his return, he expressed a critical view of the Bible's historical accuracy and questioned the basis for considering one religion more valid than another. In the next few years, while intensively speculating on geology and the transmutation of species, he gave much thought to religion and openly discussed this with his wife Emma, whose beliefs similarly came from intensive study and questioning.
+The theodicy of Paley and Thomas Malthus vindicated evils such as starvation as a result of a benevolent creator's laws, which had an overall good effect. To Darwin, natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design. He was increasingly troubled by the problem of evil and he could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering, such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs. Though he thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, in a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin also confessed that he could not "anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe (as) the result of brute force," making him reluctant to give up the idea of God as an ultimate lawgiver. 
+Darwin remained close friends with the vicar of Downe, John Brodie Innes, and continued to play a leading part in the parish work of the church, but from c. 1849 would go for a walk on Sundays while his family attended church. He considered it "absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist" and, though reticent about his religious views, in a letter to John Fordyce in 1879, he wrote that "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind". 
+
+At other times he believed in a First Cause, citing the extreme difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.
+The "Lady Hope Story", published in 1915, claimed that Darwin had reverted to Christianity on his sickbed. The claims were repudiated by Darwin's children and have been dismissed as false by historians.

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+---
+title: "Edward Digges"
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+---
+
+Edward Digges (14 February 1620 – 15 March 1674/75) was an English barrister and colonist who became a premium tobacco planter and official in the Virginia colony. The son of the English politician Dudley Digges represented the colony before the Virginia Company of London and the royal government, as well as served for two decades on the colony's Council of State. Digges served as interim Colonial Governor of Virginia from March 1655 to December 1656, and for longer periods as the colony's receiver general and auditor-general. He is also known for planting mulberry trees and promoting the silk industry in the colony.
+
+== Early life and education ==
+Born in Chilham Castle, Kent, England, and christened in Chilham parish on 29 March 1620, Edward Digges was the fourth son of Sir Dudley Digges (1583–1638) and his wife Mary Kempe (1583–?). Sir Dudley was the Master of the Rolls for King Charles I and an investor in the Virginia Company of London. On 13 June 1621, that company gave Sir Dudley a patent, and on 10 June 1622 he was identified as holding the patent for a particular plantation in Virginia, but this son would not arrive in Virginia for another two decades.
+Edward Digges received an education appropriate to his class and entered Gray's Inn in 1637 to become a barrister.
+
+== Career ==
+Digges emigrated to the Virginia Colony about 1650 and purchased from Captain John West a 1250-acre plantation in Hampton Parish, York County, Virginia, near Yorktown. Digges also patented land in Surry, New Kent and Gloucester counties. About 1653, Digges laid out Fort Mattapony near Walkerton, King and Queen County, Virginia.
+
+=== Tobacco planter ===
+Edward Digges had more success growing premium tobacco than manufacturing silk. He grew a sweet-scented tobacco variety which brought an unusually high price in London, and which he exported in casks marked "E.D.".
+
+=== Silk production experiments ===
+Digges attempted to revive silk production in Virginia. Others had previously attempted silkworm cultivation on mulberry trees, in response to King James's interest in the subject. However, these early efforts had not succeeded, so others showed little enthusiasm for the project. Digges, in contrast, became deeply absorbed in his project, and brought over two Armenians (now considered the first Armenians in America) to help him experiment with silk production. Digges even wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Reformed Virginia Silkworm", in which he claimed that "native silkworms could be kept outdoors on native mulberry trees and that Indians could be employed to care for the worms."
+
+Digges sent a parcel of his silk to the Royal Society, by way of his cousin Dudley Palmer, one of the original Fellows of the Society. The letter accompanying the silk sample, stated his findings, for example:
+
+Our Country of Virginia is very much subject to Thunders : and it hath thundered exceedingly when I have had worms of all sorts, some newly hatched; some halfway in their feeding; others spinning their Silk; yet I found none of them concerned in the Thunder, but kept to their business, as if there had been no such thing.
+Digges's efforts to create a silk industry in Virginia proved futile, despite him being awarded £100 as a reward. By 1656 the Virginia Assembly had become disillusioned with silkworms, and passed the following terse act:
+
+ WHEREAS the act for mullberrie trees seemes rather troublesome and burthensome then any waies advantageous to the country, It is hereby enacted, That the said act for planting mullberrie trees shall be repealed and made void.
+To this day numerous mulberry trees, which were used to raise the silk worms, still stand on what had been his plantation. In recognition of his efforts, as discussed below, Edward Digges was given a seat on the Virginia Governor's Council (also known as the "Council of State") in November 1654, for "having given a signal testimony of his fidelity to this colony and commonwealth of England."
+
+=== Politician ===
+Digges received his seat on the Virginia Governor's Council during the English Civil War, two years after Virginia's governor and legislature recognized the Cromwellian (or Parliamentarian) government. During the absence of Virginia Governor Richard Bennett (who had considerable interest in the Maryland colony as well) but sailed for England to meet Oliver Cromwell), the Virginia General Assembly selected Digges as Colonial Governor of Virginia. After serving from 30 March 1655 until December 1656, Digges informed the House of Burgesses that he intended to sail for England on family business. For his gubernatorial service Digges received a salary of 25,000 pounds of tobacco, paid from duties levied on vessels and marriage license fees. In December 1656, legislators selected Samuel Mathews as governor to replace Digges, and later negotiated with former governor (and royalist) William Berkeley to re-assume that office. Meanwhile, legislators appointed Digges as the colony's agent to England. Thus he met with English merchants and others about the price of tobacco, and sought to secure other rights of the colony. When he sailed in March 1657, Digges took a letter from the House of Burgesses to Oliver Cromwell, who had been ruling England since 1653 to settle the long pending controversy between the Colony and Lord Baltimore of the Maryland colony.
+
+== Marriage and family ==
+
+Edward Digges married Elizabeth Page, daughter of Francis Page (1595-1678), who according to a tomb inscription bore six sons and seven daughters. She survived her husband by more than a decade. Five children survived their parents. The daughter of a burgess and sister of Col. John Page of Middle Plantation, she had been raised at "Bedfont" plantation in Middlesex County. Her niece, Mary Page, married Col. Chiles, Speaker of the House of Burgesses.
+The six Digges children who survived to adulthood:

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+title: "Edward Digges"
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+
+William Digges (c. 1651 – 24 July 1697) served in the House of Burgesses as well as in local offices. He married Elizabeth Wharton, step-daughter of Lord Baltimore, and had ten children.
+Dudley Digges (burgess) (1664 – 18 Jan 1710) served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly. He married Susannah Cole (1674 – 1708), daughter of Col. William Cole of Bolthorpe by his first wife, and produced four children:
+Cole Digges (burgess) (1691-1744)
+Edward Digges (who died in Woodford, England in 1711)
+Dudley Digges Jr. (1694-1768)
+A daughter, Elizabeth
+Mary (– 1690/91); she married her first cousin Francis Page, and had a daughter Elizabeth, who in turn married a first cousin (John Page) and died in 1702, aged 19, leaving two children (John and Elizabeth), both of whom died without issue.
+Anne (– 1686); she became the second wife of Col. William Cole (member of the Governor's Council) of Bolthorpe in Warwick County, Virginia. They had two sons, both of whom died in childhood, although her husband remarried and the son of his third wife, the former Martha Lear, was William Cole who represented Warwick County alongside Cole Digges mentioned above.
+Edward; he shared in the 1692 division of his mother's estate, but died unmarried and without issue.
+Catherine (1654–1729); she lived in New Kent, Virginia, and married three times. She produced 3 sons (Edward, James, and William Herndon).
+
+== Death and legacy ==
+Digges died in 1675. His widow (and sole executrix under the terms of his will dated 28 August 1669, and proved 16 June 1675) survived him by 16 years, and occupied the property until her demise, in addition to receiving 1200 pounds sterling under the terms of the will. A large tombstone marks his grave near his home at Bellfield Plantation, inscribed as follows:
+
+To the memory of Edward Digges Esq.  Sonne of Dudley Digges of Chilham in Kent Kn t & Bar t Master of the Rolls in the rain of K. Charles the First. He departed this life 15th of March 1674 in the LIII d year of his age, one of his Mag ty Councill for this his colony of Virginia. A gentlemen of most commendable parts and ingenuity, the only introducer and promoter of the silk manufacture in this colony. And in everything else a pattern worthy of all Pious Imitation. He had issue 6 sons and 7 daughters by the body of Elizabeth his wife who of her conjugal affection hath dedicated to him this Memorial.
+Digges' will left legacies "to all my children being four boys and four girls", although only sons William, Dudley and Edward II, and a granddaughter would survive their mother.
+During Bacon's Rebellion not long after his death, Mrs. Digges and her eldest son William Diggs suffered losses because of family loyalty to the King, and William fled to the Maryland colony, where he held offices as well as property before returning to Virginia.
+The plantation which Digges had purchased from Capt. John West (known as the E. D. plantation) remained in the family until 1787, when it was sold.  It was known as "Bellfield" by 1811, when it was advertised for sale as "Belfield, 1.000 acres in York Co., the only estate where the famous E.D. tobacco was raised, which never failed to bring in England one shilling when other tobacco would not bring three pence." It is currently under federal control as part of the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.
+
+== See also ==
+Virginia
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Francis Galton"
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+
+Sir Francis Galton (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English polymath and the originator of eugenics during the Victorian era; his ideas later became the basis of behavioural genetics.
+Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also developed the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He popularised the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.
+As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics and differential psychology, as well as the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for. His quest for the scientific principles of diverse phenomena extended even to the optimal method for making tea. As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He also invented the Galton whistle for testing differential hearing ability. Galton was knighted in 1909 for his contributions to science. He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin.
+In recent years, he has received significant criticism for being a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and biological racism; indeed he was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883.
+Galton is credited with popularizing the phrase "nature versus nurture" to frame the academic discussion regarding the relative influence of heredity and environment on human ability and social advancement.
+
+== Early life ==
+Galton was born at "The Larches", a large house in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, England, built on the site of "Fair Hill", the former home of Joseph Priestley, which the botanist William Withering had renamed. He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin. His father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel Galton Jr. He was also a cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton. The Galtons were Quaker gun-manufacturers and bankers, while the Darwins were involved in medicine and science.
+Both the Galton and Darwin families included Fellows of the Royal Society and members who loved to invent in their spare time. Both Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Galton were founding members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which included Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Both families were known for their literary talent. Erasmus Darwin composed lengthy technical treatises in verse. Galton's aunt Mary Anne Galton wrote on aesthetics and religion, and her autobiography detailed the environment of her childhood populated by Lunar Society members.
+
+Galton was a child prodigy – he was reading by the age of two; at age five he knew some Greek, Latin and long division, and by the age of six he had moved on to adult books, including Shakespeare for pleasure, and poetry, which he quoted at length. Galton attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, but chafed at the narrow classical curriculum and left at 16. His parents pressed him to enter the medical profession, and he studied for two years at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College London Medical School. He followed this up with mathematical studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1840 to early 1844.
+According to the records of the United Grand Lodge of England, it was in February 1844 that Galton became a freemason at the Scientific lodge, held at the Red Lion Inn in Cambridge, progressing through the three masonic degrees: Apprentice, 5 February 1844; Fellow Craft, 11 March 1844; Master Mason, 13 May 1844. A note in the record states: "Francis Galton Trinity College student, gained his certificate 13 March 1845". One of Galton's masonic certificates from Scientific lodge can be found among his papers at University College, London.
+A nervous breakdown frustrated Galton's plan to try for honours. He elected instead to take a "poll" (pass) B.A. degree, like his half-cousin Charles Darwin. (Following the Cambridge custom, he was awarded an M.A. without further study, in 1847.) He briefly resumed his medical studies but the death of his father in 1844 left him emotionally destitute, though financially independent, and he terminated his medical studies entirely, turning to foreign travel, sport and technical invention.
+In his early years Galton was an enthusiastic traveller, and made a solo trip through Eastern Europe to Istanbul, before going up to Cambridge. In 1845 and 1846, he went to Egypt and travelled up the Nile to Khartoum in the Sudan, and from there to Beirut, Damascus and down to Jordan.
+In 1850 he joined the Royal Geographical Society, and over the next two years mounted a long and difficult expedition into then little-known South West Africa (now Namibia). He wrote a book on his experience, Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic survey of the region. This established his reputation as a geographer and explorer. He proceeded to write the best-selling The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move, which went through many editions and is still in print.
+
+== Career ==

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+title: "Francis Galton"
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+
+=== Early scientific career ===
+Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields, including meteorology (the anticyclone and the first popular weather maps), statistics (regression and correlation), psychology (synaesthesia), biology (the nature and mechanism of heredity), and criminology (fingerprints). Much of this was influenced by his penchant for counting and measuring. Galton prepared the first weather map published in The Times (1 April 1875, showing the weather from the previous day, 31 March), now a standard feature in newspapers worldwide.
+He became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presenting many papers on a wide variety of topics at its meetings from 1858 to 1899. He was the general secretary from 1863 to 1867, president of the Geographical section in 1867 and 1872, and president of the Anthropological Section in 1877 and 1885. He was active on the council of the Royal Geographical Society for over forty years, in various committees of the Royal Society, and on the Meteorological Council.
+James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wilhelm Wundt who had been reading Galton's articles, decided he wanted to study under him. He eventually built a professional relationship with Galton, measuring subjects and working together on research.
+In 1888, Galton established a lab in the science galleries of the South Kensington Museum. In Galton's lab, participants could be measured to gain knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. Galton also used these data for his own research. He would typically charge people a small fee for his services.
+
+=== Heredity and eugenics ===
+
+The publication by his cousin Charles Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859 changed Galton's life. He came to be gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on "Variation under Domestication", concerning animal breeding.
+Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted in The Origin of Species, although he returned to it in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, drawing on his cousin's work in the intervening period. Galton established a research program which embraced multiple aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height; from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end, the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data.
+Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population. To test this, he invented the methods of historiometry. Galton obtained extensive data from a broad range of biographical sources which he tabulated and compared in various ways. This pioneering work was described in detail in his book Hereditary Genius in 1869. Here he showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third. He took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities.
+Galton recognised the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins. His method envisaged testing to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments. He again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper The history of twins in 1875. In so doing he anticipated the modern field of behaviour genetics, which relies heavily on twin studies. He concluded that the evidence favoured nature rather than nurture. He also proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate the effects of heredity and environment.
+Galton recognised that cultural circumstances influenced the capability of a civilisation's citizens, and their reproductive success. In Hereditary Genius, he envisaged a situation conducive to resilient and enduring civilisation as follows:
+
+The best form of civilization in respect to the improvement of the race, would be one in which society was not costly; where incomes were chiefly derived from professional sources, and not much through inheritance; where every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early youth; where marriage was held in as high honor as in ancient Jewish times; where the pride of race was encouraged (of course I do not refer to the nonsensical sentiment of the present day, that goes under that name); where the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods, and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalized.

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+
+Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In the book's introduction, he wrote: [This book's] intention is to touch on various topics more or less connected with that of the cultivation of race, or, as we might call it, with "eugenic"1 questions, and to present the results of several of my own separate investigations.1 This is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viriculture, which I once ventured to use.
+He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged via provision of monetary incentives. He pointed out some of the tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children, which he thought were dysgenic. He advocated encouraging eugenic marriages by supplying able couples with incentives to have children. On 29 October 1901, Galton chose to address eugenic issues when he delivered the second Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute.
+The Eugenics Review, the journal of the Eugenics Education Society, commenced publication in 1909. Galton, the Honorary President of the society, wrote the foreword for the first volume. The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in July 1912. Winston Churchill and Carls Elliot were among the attendees.
+
+=== Model for population stability ===

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+title: "Francis Galton"
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+
+Galton's formulation of regression and its link to the bivariate normal distribution can be traced to his attempts at developing a mathematical model for population stability. Although Galton's first attempt to study Darwinian questions, Hereditary Genius, generated little enthusiasm at the time, the text led to his further studies in the 1870s concerning the inheritance of physical traits. This text contains some crude notions of the concept of regression, described in a qualitative matter. For example, he wrote of dogs: "If a man breeds from strong, well-shaped dogs, but of mixed pedigree, the puppies will be sometimes, but rarely, the equals of their parents. They will commonly be of a mongrel, nondescript type, because ancestral peculiarities are apt to crop out in the offspring."
+This notion created a problem for Galton, as he could not reconcile the tendency of a population to maintain a normal distribution of traits from generation to generation with the notion of inheritance. It seemed that a large number of factors operated independently on offspring, leading to the normal distribution of a trait in each generation. However, this provided no explanation as to how a parent can have a significant impact on his offspring, which was the basis of inheritance.
+Galton's solution to this problem was presented in his Presidential Address at the September 1885 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, for he was serving at the time as President of Section H: Anthropology. The address was published in Nature, and Galton further developed the theory in "Regression toward mediocrity in hereditary stature" and "Hereditary Stature". An elaboration of this theory was published in 1889 in Natural Inheritance. There were three key developments that helped Galton develop this theory: the development of the law of error in 1874–1875, the formulation of an empirical law of reversion in 1877, and the development of a mathematical framework encompassing regression using human population data during 1885.
+Galton's development of the law of regression to the mean, or reversion, was due to insights from the Galton board ('bean machine') and his studies of sweet peas. While Galton had previously invented the quincunx prior to February 1874, the 1877 version of the quincunx had a new feature that helped Galton demonstrate that a normal mixture of normal distributions is also normal. Galton demonstrated this using a new version of quincunx, adding chutes to the apparatus to represent reversion. When the pellets passed through the curved chutes (representing reversion) and then the pins (representing family variability), the result was a stable population. On Friday 19 February 1877, Galton gave a lecture entitled Typical Laws of Heredity at the Royal Institution in London. In this lecture, he posited that there must be a counteracting force to maintain population stability. However, this model required a much larger degree of intergenerational natural selection than was plausible.
+In 1875, Galton began growing sweet peas, and addressed the Royal Institution on his findings on 9 February 1877. He found that each group of progeny seeds followed a normal curve, and the curves were equally disperse. Each group was not centred on the parent's weight, but rather at a weight closer to the population average. Galton called this reversion, as every progeny group was distributed at a value that was closer to the population average than the parent. The deviation from the population average was in the same direction, but the magnitude of the deviation was only one-third as large. In doing so, he demonstrated that there was variability among each of the families, yet the families combined to produce a stable, normally distributed population. When he addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1885, he said of his investigation of sweet peas, "I was then blind to what I now perceive to be the simple explanation of the phenomenon."
+Galton was able to further his notion of regression by collecting and analysing data on human stature. Galton asked for help of mathematician J. Hamilton Dickson in investigating the geometric relationship of the data. He determined that the regression coefficient did not ensure population stability by chance, but rather that the regression coefficient, conditional variance, and population variance, were interdependent quantities related by a simple equation. Thus Galton identified that the linearity of regression was not coincidental but rather was a necessary consequence of population stability.
+The model for population stability resulted in Galton's formulation of the Law of Ancestral Heredity. This law, which was published in Natural Inheritance, states that the two parents of an offspring jointly contribute one half of an offspring's heritage, while the other, more-removed ancestors constitute a smaller proportion of the offspring's heritage. Galton viewed reversion as a spring, that when stretched, would return the distribution of traits back to the normal distribution. He concluded that evolution would have to occur via discontinuous steps, as reversion would neutralise any incremental steps. When Mendel's principles were rediscovered in 1900, this resulted in a fierce battle between the followers of Galton's Law of Ancestral Heredity, the biometricians, and those who advocated Mendel's principles.
+
+=== Empirical test of pangenesis and Lamarckism ===
+Galton conducted wide-ranging inquiries into heredity which led him to challenge Charles Darwin's hypothesis of pangenesis. Darwin had proposed as part of this model that certain particles, which he called "gemmules" moved throughout the body and were also responsible for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Galton, in consultation with Darwin, set out to see if they were transported in the blood. In a long series of experiments in 1869 to 1871, he transfused the blood between dissimilar breeds of rabbits, and examined the features of their offspring. He found no evidence of characters transmitted in the transfused blood.
+Darwin challenged the validity of Galton's experiment, giving his reasons in an article published in Nature where he wrote:

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+
+Now, in the chapter on Pangenesis in my Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication I have not said one word about the blood, or about any fluid proper to any circulating system. It is, indeed, obvious that the presence of gemmules in the blood can form no necessary part of my hypothesis; for I refer in illustration of it to the lowest animals, such as the Protozoa, which do not possess blood or any vessels; and I refer to plants in which the fluid, when present in the vessels, cannot be considered as true blood. The fundamental laws of growth, reproduction, inheritance, &c., are so closely similar throughout the whole organic kingdom, that the means by which the gemmules (assuming for the moment their existence) are diffused through the body, would probably be the same in all beings; therefore the means can hardly be diffusion through the blood. Nevertheless, when I first heard of Mr. Galton's experiments, I did not sufficiently reflect on the subject, and saw not the difficulty of believing in the presence of gemmules in the blood.
+
+Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), and was an early proponent of "hard heredity" through selection alone. He came close to rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory of inheritance, but was prevented from making the final breakthrough in this regard because of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete, traits (now regarded as polygenic traits). He went on to found the biometric approach to the study of heredity, distinguished by its use of statistical techniques to study continuous traits and population-scale aspects of heredity.
+This approach was later taken up enthusiastically by Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon; together, they founded the highly influential journal Biometrika in 1901. (R. A. Fisher would later show how the biometrical approach could be reconciled with the Mendelian approach.) The statistical techniques that Galton developed (correlation and regression—see below) and phenomena he established (regression to the mean) formed the basis of the biometric approach and are now essential tools in all social sciences.
+
+== 1884 International Health Exhibition ==

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+
+=== Anthropometric Laboratory ===
+In 1884, London hosted the International Health Exhibition. This exhibition placed much emphasis on highlighting Victorian developments in sanitation and public health, and allowed the nation to display its advanced public health outreach, compared to other countries at the time. Francis Galton took advantage of this opportunity to set up his anthropometric laboratory. He stated that the purpose of this laboratory was to "show the public the simplicity of the instruments and methods by which the chief physical characteristics of man may be measured and recorded." The laboratory was an interactive walk-through in which physical characteristics such as height, weight, and eyesight, would be measured for each subject after payment of an admission fee. Upon entering the laboratory, a subject would visit the following stations in order.
+First, they would fill in a form with personal and family history (age, birthplace, marital status, residence, and occupation), then visit stations that recorded hair and eye colour, followed by the keenness, colour-sense, and depth perception of sight. Next, they would examine the keenness, or relative acuteness, of hearing and highest audible note of their hearing followed by an examination of their sense of touch. However, because the surrounding area was noisy, the apparatus intended to measure hearing was rendered ineffective by the noise and echoes in the building. Their breathing capacity would also be measured, as well as their ability to throw a punch. The next stations would examine strength of both pulling and squeezing with both hands. Lastly, subjects' heights in various positions (sitting, standing, etc.) as well as arm span and weight would be measured.
+One excluded characteristic of interest was the size of the head. Galton notes in his analysis that this omission was mostly for practical reasons. For instance, it would not be very accurate and additionally it would require much time for women to disassemble and reassemble their hair and bonnets. The patrons would then be given a souvenir containing all their biological data, while Galton would also keep a copy for future statistical research.
+Although the laboratory did not employ any revolutionary measurement techniques, it was unique because of the simple logistics of constructing such a demonstration within a limited space, and because of the speed and efficiency with which all the necessary data were gathered. The laboratory itself was a see-through (lattice-walled) fenced off gallery measuring 36 feet long by 6 feet long. To collect data efficiently, Galton had to make the process as simple as possible for people to understand. As a result, subjects were taken through the laboratory in pairs so that explanations could be given to two at a time, also in the hope that one of the two would confidently take the initiative to go through all the tests first, encouraging the other. With this design, the total time spent in the exhibit was fourteen minutes for each pair.
+Galton states that the measurements of human characteristics are useful for two reasons. First, he states that measuring physical characteristics is useful in order to ensure, on a more domestic level, that children are developing properly. A useful example he gives for the practicality of these domestic measurements is regularly checking a child's eyesight, in order to correct any deficiencies early on. The second use for the data from his anthropometric laboratory is for statistical studies. He comments on the usefulness of the collected data to compare attributes across occupations, residences, races, etc. The exhibit at the health exhibition allowed Galton to collect a large amount of raw data from which to conduct further comparative studies. He had 9,337 respondents, each measured in 17 categories, creating a rather comprehensive statistical database.
+After the conclusion of the International Health Exhibition, Galton used these data to confirm in humans his theory of linear regression, posed after studying sweet peas. The accumulation of this human data allowed him to observe the correlation between forearm length and height, head width and head breadth, and head length and height. With these observations he was able to write Co-relations and their Measurements, chiefly from Anthropometric Data. In this publication, Galton defined what co-relation as a phenomenon that occurs when "the variation of the one [variable] is accompanied on the average by more or less variation of the other, and in the same direction."
+
+== Statistical innovation and psychological theory ==
+
+=== Historiometry ===
+The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. To bolster these results, and to attempt to make a distinction between 'nature' and 'nurture' (he was the first to apply this phrase to the topic), he devised a questionnaire that he sent out to 190 Fellows of the Royal Society. He tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents. He attempted to discover whether their interest in science was 'innate' or due to the encouragements of others. The studies were published as a book, English men of science: their nature and nurture, in 1874. In the end, it promoted the nature versus nurture question, though it did not settle it, and provided some fascinating data on the sociology of scientists of the time.
+
+=== The lexical hypothesis ===
+Galton was the first scientist to recognise what is now known as the lexical hypothesis. This is the idea that the most salient and socially relevant personality differences in people's lives will eventually become encoded into language. The hypothesis further suggests that by sampling language, it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits.

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+
+=== The questionnaire ===
+Galton's inquiries into the mind involved detailed recording of people's subjective accounts of whether and how their minds dealt with phenomena such as mental imagery. To better elicit this information, he pioneered the use of the questionnaire. In one study, he asked his fellow members of the Royal Society of London to describe mental images that they experienced. In another, he collected in-depth surveys from eminent scientists for a work examining the effects of nature and nurture on the propensity toward scientific thinking.
+
+=== Variance and standard deviation ===
+Core to any statistical analysis is the concept that measurements vary: they have both a central tendency, or mean, and a spread around this central value, or variance. In the late 1860s, Galton conceived of a measure to quantify normal variation: the standard deviation.
+Galton was a keen observer. In 1906, visiting a livestock fair, he stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 participated, and Galton was able to study their individual entries after the event. Galton stated that "the middlemost estimate expresses the vox populi, every other estimate being condemned as too low or too high by a majority of the voters", and reported this value (the median, in terminology he himself had introduced, but chose not to use on this occasion) as 1,207 pounds. To his surprise, this was within 0.8% of the weight measured by the judges. Soon afterwards, in response to an enquiry, he reported the mean of the guesses as 1,197 pounds, but did not comment on its improved accuracy. Recent archival research has found some slips in transmitting Galton's calculations to the original article in Nature: the median was actually 1,208 pounds, and the dressed weight of the ox 1,197 pounds, so the mean estimate had zero error. James Surowiecki uses this weight-judging competition as his opening example: had he known the true result, his conclusion on the wisdom of the crowd would no doubt have been more strongly expressed.
+The same year, Galton suggested in a letter to the journal Nature a better method of cutting a round cake by avoiding making radial incisions.
+
+=== Experimental derivation of the normal distribution ===
+
+Studying variation, Galton invented the Galton board, a pachinko-like device also known as the bean machine, as a tool for demonstrating the law of error and the normal distribution.
+
+=== Bivariate normal distribution ===
+He also discovered the properties of the bivariate normal distribution and its relationship to correlation and regression analysis.
+
+=== Correlation and regression ===
+
+In 1846, the French physicist Auguste Bravais (1811–1863) first developed what would become the correlation coefficient. After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton independently rediscovered the concept of correlation in 1888 and demonstrated its application in the study of heredity, anthropology, and psychology. Galton's later statistical study of the probability of extinction of surnames led to the concept of Galton–Watson stochastic processes.
+Galton invented the use of the regression line and for the choice of r (for reversion or regression) to represent the correlation coefficient.
+In the 1870s and 1880s he was a pioneer in the use of normal theory to fit histograms and ogives to actual tabulated data, much of which he collected himself: for instance large samples of sibling and parental height. Consideration of the results from these empirical studies led to his further insights into evolution, natural selection, and regression to the mean.
+
+=== Regression toward the mean ===
+Galton was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of sweet peas.
+The conditions under which regression toward the mean occurs depend on the way the term is mathematically defined. Galton first observed the phenomenon in the context of simple linear regression of data points. Galton developed the following model: pellets fall through a quincunx or "bean machine" forming a normal distribution centred directly under their entrance point. These pellets could then be released down into a second gallery (corresponding to a second measurement occasion). Galton then asked the reverse question "from where did these pellets come?"
+
+The answer was not "on average directly above". Rather it was "on average, more towards the middle", for the simple reason that there were more pellets above it towards the middle that could wander left than there were in the left extreme that could wander to the right, inwards.
+
+=== Theories of perception ===
+Galton went beyond measurement and summary to attempt to explain the phenomena he observed. Among such developments, he proposed an early theory of ranges of sound and hearing, and collected large quantities of anthropometric data from the public through his popular and long-running Anthropometric Laboratory, which he established in 1884, and where he studied over 9,000 people. It was not until 1985 that these data were analysed in their entirety.
+He made a beauty map of Britain, based on a secret grading of the local women on a scale from attractive to repulsive. The lowest point was in Aberdeen.
+
+=== Differential psychology ===
+
+Galton's study of human abilities ultimately led to the foundation of differential psychology and the formulation of the first mental tests. He was interested in measuring humans in every way possible. This included measuring their ability to make sensory discrimination which he assumed was linked to intellectual prowess. Galton suggested that individual differences in general ability are reflected in performance on relatively simple sensory capacities and in speed of reaction to a stimulus, variables that could be objectively measured by tests of sensory discrimination and reaction
+time. He also measured how quickly people reacted which he later linked to internal wiring which ultimately limited intelligence ability. Throughout his research Galton assumed that people who reacted faster were more intelligent than others.

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+
+=== Composite photography ===
+Galton also devised a technique called "composite portraiture" (produced by superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals' faces registered on their eyes) to create an average face (see averageness). In the 1990s, a hundred years after his discovery, much psychological research has examined the attractiveness of these faces, an aspect that Galton had remarked on in his original lecture. Others, including Sigmund Freud in his work on dreams, picked up Galton's suggestion that these composites might represent a useful metaphor for an Ideal type or a concept of a "natural kind" (see Eleanor Rosch)—such as Jewish men, criminals, patients with tuberculosis, etc.—onto the same photographic plate, thereby yielding a blended whole, or "composite", that he hoped could generalise the facial appearance of his subject into an "average" or "central type". (See also entry Modern physiognomy under Physiognomy).
+This work began in the 1880s while the Jewish scholar Joseph Jacobs studied anthropology and statistics with Francis Galton. Jacobs asked Galton to create a composite photograph of a Jewish type. One of Jacobs' first publications that used Galton's composite imagery was "The Jewish Type, and Galton's Composite Photographs", Photographic News, 29, (24 April 1885): 268–269.
+Galton hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. However, his technique did not prove useful and fell into disuse, although after much work on it including by photographers Lewis Hine, John L. Lovell and Arthur Batut.
+
+=== Fingerprints ===
+The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880. Galton was introduced to the field by his half-cousin Charles Darwin, who was a friend of Faulds, and he went on to create the first scientific footing for the study (which assisted its acceptance by the courts) although Galton did not ever give credit that the original idea was not his.
+In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (Finger Prints, 1892; Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints, 1893; and Fingerprint Directories, 1895), Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. He wrote about the technique (inadvertently sparking a controversy between Herschel and Faulds that was to last until 1917), identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day. He described and classified them into eight broad categories: 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.
+
+== Views ==
+In 1873, Galton wrote a letter to The Times titled "Africa for the Chinese", where he argued that the Chinese, as a race capable of high civilisation and only temporarily stunted by the recent failures of Chinese dynasties, should be encouraged to immigrate to Africa and displace the inferior aboriginal blacks.
+According to an editorial in Nature: "Galton also constructed a racial hierarchy, in which white people were considered superior. He wrote that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own (the Anglo Saxon)." According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide, Galton bordered on the justification of genocide when he stated: "There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race."
+In an effort to reach a wider audience, Galton worked on a novel entitled Kantsaywhere from May until December 1910. The novel described a utopia organised by a eugenic religion, designed to breed fitter and smarter humans. His unpublished notebooks show that this was an expansion of material he had been composing since at least 1901. He offered it to Methuen for publication, but they showed little enthusiasm. Galton wrote to his niece that it should be either "smothered or superseded". His niece appears to have burnt most of the novel, offended by the love scenes, but large fragments survived, and it was published online by University College, London.
+
+== Personal life ==
+In January 1853, Galton met Louisa Jane Butler (1822–1897); they married on 1 August 1853. Their marriage of 43 years ended with the death of Galton's wife. They had no children.
+
+Galton, "On his own estimation he was a supremely intelligent man and felt that we should encourage the survival of the fittest." Later in life, Galton proposed a connection between genius and insanity based on his own experience:Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity. Attestations and descriptions of Galton's character were made by Beatrice Webb, James Arthur Harris, and Karl Pearson. He also corresponded with Beatrix Lucia Catherine Tollemache.
+Galton is buried in the family tomb in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels, in the village of Claverdon, Warwickshire.
+
+== Awards and influence ==
+
+Over the course of his career Galton received many awards, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1910). He received in 1853 the Founder's Medal, the highest award of the Royal Geographical Society, for his explorations and map-making of southwest Africa. He was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club in 1855 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1860. His autobiography also lists:
+
+Silver Medal, French Geographical Society (1854)
+Gold Medal of the Royal Society (1886)
+Officier de l'Instruction Publique, France (1891)
+D.C.L. Oxford (1894)
+Sc.D. (Honorary), Cambridge (1895)
+Huxley Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute (1901)
+Elected Hon. Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge (1902)
+Darwin Medal, Royal Society (1902)
+Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal (1908)
+Galton was knighted in 1909:

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+
+The KING has also been pleased, by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, bearing date the 26th June, 1909, to confer the dignity of a Knight of the said United Kingdom upon:
+Francis Galton, Esq., Sc.D., F.R.S., Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
+His statistical heir Karl Pearson, first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College, London (now Galton Chair of Genetics), wrote a three-volume biography of Galton, in four parts, after his death.
+The flowering plant genus Galtonia was named after Galton.
+University College London has in the twenty-first century been involved in a historical inquiry into its role as the institutional birthplace of eugenics. Galton established a laboratory at UCL in 1904. Some students and staff have called on the university to rename its Galton lecture theatre, with journalist Angela Saini stating, "Galton's seductive promise was of a bold new world filled only with beautiful, intelligent, productive people. The scientists in its thrall claimed this could be achieved by controlling reproduction, policing borders to prevent certain types of immigrants, and locking away "undesirables", including disabled people."
+In June 2020, University College London (UCL) announced the renaming of a lecture theatre named after Galton because of his connection with eugenics.
+
+== Published works ==
+
+== Collections ==
+After Galton's death in 1911, his archive donated to University College London by his executors. The Galton Papers include material about Galton's personal life and family, correspondence, and papers relating to his scientific work. Material was subsequently added to the collection to through gifts from Galton's nephew and other family members, and via purchases made through Karl Pearson and other members of the Galton Laboratory. Galton's personal library was incorporated into the library of the Galton Laboratory; these books are also held at University College London.
+University College London also holds the papers of Galton's protégé Karl Pearson, the records of the Galton Laboratory, and successors to the Galton Professor role including J.B.S. Haldane and L.S. Penrose.
+The Royal Geographical Society holds material relating to Galton including photographs, correspondence and a telescope he used in expeditions.
+
+== See also ==
+Eugenics
+Eugenics in the United States
+Founders of statistics
+Galton Laboratory
+Historiometry
+Hereditarianism
+History of evolutionary thought
+New eugenics
+Social darwinism
+Social effects of evolutionary theory
+
+== References ==
+
+=== Citations ===
+
+=== Sources ===
+
+=== Further reading ===
+
+== External links ==
+
+Works by Francis Galton at Project Gutenberg
+Works by or about Francis Galton at the Internet Archive
+Works by Francis Galton at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
+O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Francis Galton", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
+Catalogue of the Galton papers  held at University College London
+"Biography of Francis Galton".

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+title: "George Cayley"
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+
+Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (27 December 1773 – 15 December 1857) was an English engineer, inventor, and aviator. He was a pioneer of aeronautical engineering and is sometimes referred to as "the father of aviation", designing the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He is commonly credited as the first person to understand the underlying principles and forces of heavier-than-air flight: weight, lift, drag and thrust. He was also the inventor of the wire wheel.
+In 1799, he set forth the concept of the modern aeroplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control. Modern aeroplane design is based on those discoveries and on the cambered wings he proposed. He constructed the first flying model aeroplane and also diagrammed the elements of vertical flight. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation.
+Cayley represented the Whig party as Member of Parliament for Scarborough from 1832 to 1835, and in 1838, helped found the UK's first Polytechnic Institute, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now University of Westminster) and served as its chairman for many years. He was elected as a Vice-President of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in 1824. He was a founding member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and was a distant cousin of the mathematician Arthur Cayley.
+
+== General engineering projects ==
+Cayley, from Brompton-by-Sawdon, near Scarborough in Yorkshire, inherited Brompton Hall and Wydale Hall and other estates on the death of his father, the 5th baronet.  Captured by the optimism of the times, he engaged in a wide variety of engineering projects.  Among the many things that he developed are self-righting lifeboats, tension-spoke wheels, the "Universal Railway" (his term for caterpillar tractors), automatic signals for railway crossings, seat belts, small scale helicopters, and a kind of prototypical internal combustion engine fuelled by gunpowder (Gunpowder engine).  He suggested that a more practical engine might be made using gaseous vapours rather than gunpowder, thus foreseeing the modern internal combustion engine. He also contributed in the fields of prosthetics, air engines, electricity, theatre architecture, ballistics, optics and land reclamation, and held the belief that these advancements should be freely available.
+According to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, George Cayley was the inventor of the hot air engine in 1807: "The first successfully working hot air engine was Cayley's, in which much ingenuity was displayed in overcoming practical difficulties arising from the high working temperature." His second hot air engine of 1837 was a forerunner of the internal combustion engine: "In 1837, Sir George Cayley, Bart., Assoc. Inst. C.E., applied the products of combustion from closed furnaces, so that they should act directly upon a piston in a cylinder. Plate No. 9 represents a pair of engines upon this principle, together equal to 8 HP, when the piston travels at the rate of 220 feet per minute."
+
+== Flying machines ==
+
+Cayley is mainly remembered for his pioneering studies and experiments with flying machines, including the working, piloted glider that he designed and built. He wrote a landmark three-part treatise titled "On Aerial Navigation" (1809–1810), which was published in Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts. The 2007 discovery of sketches in Cayley's school notebooks (held in the archive of the Royal Aeronautical Society Library) revealed that even at school Cayley was developing his ideas on the theories of flight. It has been claimed that these images indicate that Cayley identified the principle of a lift-generating inclined plane as early as 1792. To measure the drag on objects at different speeds and angles of attack, he later built a "whirling-arm apparatus", a development of earlier work in ballistics and air resistance. He also experimented with rotating wing sections of various forms in the stairwells at Brompton Hall.
+
+These scientific experiments led him to develop an efficient cambered airfoil and to identify the four vector forces that influence an aircraft: thrust, lift, drag, and weight. He discovered the importance of the dihedral angle for lateral stability in flight, and deliberately set the centre of gravity of many of his models well below the wings for this reason; these principles influenced the development of hang gliders. As a result of his investigations into many other theoretical aspects of flight, many now acknowledge him as the first aeronautical engineer.  His emphasis on lightness led him to invent a new method of constructing lightweight wheels which is in common use today.  For his landing wheels, he shifted the spoke's forces from compression to tension by making them from tightly-stretched string, in effect "reinventing the wheel". Wire soon replaced the string in practical applications and over time the wire wheel came into common use on bicycles, cars, aeroplanes and many other vehicles.

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+title: "George Cayley"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:03.078841+00:00"
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+
+The model glider successfully flown by Cayley in 1804 had the layout of a modern aircraft, with a kite-shaped wing towards the front and an adjustable  tailplane at the back consisting of horizontal stabilisers and a vertical fin.  A movable weight allowed adjustment of the model's centre of gravity.  In 1843 he was the first to suggest the idea of a convertiplane.  At some time before 1849 he designed and built a biplane in which an unknown ten-year-old boy flew. Later, with the continued assistance of his grandson George John Cayley and his resident engineer Thomas Vick, he developed a larger scale glider (also probably fitted with "flappers") which flew across Brompton Dale in front of Wydale Hall in 1853. The first adult aviator has been claimed to be either Cayley's coachman, footman or butler. One source (Gibbs-Smith) has suggested that it was John Appleby, a Cayley employee; however, there is no definitive evidence to fully identify the pilot. An entry in volume IX of the 8th Encyclopædia Britannica of 1855 is the most contemporaneous authoritative account regarding the event. A 2007 biography of Cayley (Richard Dee's The Man Who Discovered Flight: George Cayley and the First Airplane) claims the first pilot was Cayley's grandson George John Cayley (1826–1878).
+A replica of the 1853 machine was flown at the original site in Brompton Dale by Derek Piggott in 1973 for TV and in the mid-1980s for the IMAX film On the Wing. The glider is currently on display at the Yorkshire Air Museum. 
+A second replica of the Cayley Glider was built in 2003 by a team from BAE Systems to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the original flight. Built using modern materials and techniques, the craft was test flown by Alan McWhirter at RAF Pocklington, before being flown by Sir Richard Branson on 5 July 2003 at Brompton Dale, the site of the original glider’s flight. Virgin Atlantic sponsored construction of the replica glider. In 2005, the replica glider was transported and rebuilt in Salina, Kansas, as part of the ground show for the return of the  'round-the-world' Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer flight, with the glider being towed by a vehicle along the runway in front of the gathered crowds. Returning to the UK, the replica glider was flown once more for a segment on The One Show. Again towed by a vehicle, the glider undertook its longest and highest flights during the filming and was flown by Dave Holborn. Placed into storage at BAE System's Farnborough site, it was donated to the South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum in 2021 and is now on display.
+
+== Memorial ==
+
+Cayley died in 1857 and was buried in the graveyard of All Saints' Church in Brompton-by-Sawdon.
+He is commemorated in Scarborough at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, where a hall of residence and a teaching building are named after him. He is one of many scientists and engineers commemorated by having a hall of residence and a bar at Loughborough University named after him. The University of Westminster also honours Cayley's contribution to the formation of the institution with a gold plaque at the entrance of the Regent Street building.
+
+There are display boards and a video film at the Royal Air Force Museum London in Hendon honouring Cayley's achievements and a modern exhibition and film "Pioneers of Aviation" at the Yorkshire Air Museum, Elvington, York. 
+The Sir George Cayley Sailwing Club is a North Yorkshire-based free flight club, affiliated to the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, which has borne his name since its founding in 1975.
+In 1974, Cayley was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame.
+
+== Family ==
+On 3 July 1795 Cayley married Sarah Walker, daughter of his first tutor George Walker. (J W Clay's expanded edition of Dugdale's Visitation of Yorkshire incorrectly gives the date as 9 July 1795, as does George Cayley's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.) They had ten children, of whom three died young. Sarah died on 8 December 1854.
+
+== See also ==
+Early flying machines
+Matthew Piers Watt Boulton
+William Samuel Henson
+Timeline of aviation – 18th century
+Timeline of aviation – 19th century
+Kite types
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==
+Gibbs-Smith, Charles H. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 17, No. 1 (May 1962), pp. 36–56
+Gibbs-Smith, C.H. Aviation. London, NMSO, 2002
+Gerard Fairlie and Elizabeth Cayley, The Life of a Genius, Hodder and Stoughton, 1965.
+
+== External links ==
+
+Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Sir George Cayley
+Cayley's principles of flight, models and gliders
+Cayley's gliders
+Some pioneers of air engine design
+Sir George Cayley – Making Aviation Practical
+Sir George Cayley
+"Sir George Cayley – The Man: His Work" a 1954 Flight article
+"Aerodynamics in 1804" a 1954 Flight art
+"Cayley's 1853 Aeroplane" a 1973 Flight article
+Ackroyd, J.A.D. "Sir George Cayley, the father of Aeronautics". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 56 (2002) Part 1 (2), pp167–181, Part 2 (3), pp333–348
+Cayley's Flying Machines

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+title: "Goldsworthy Gurney"
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+
+Sir Goldsworthy Gurney (14 February 1793 – 28 February 1875) was a British surgeon, chemist, architect, builder, lecturer and consultant. He was a prototypical British gentleman scientist and inventor of the Victorian era.
+Amongst many accomplishments, he developed the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, and later applied its principles to a novel form of illumination, the Bude-Light; developed a series of early steam-powered road vehicles; and laid claim—still discussed and disputed today—to the blastpipe, a key component in the success of steam locomotives, engines, and other coal-fired systems.
+Events surrounding the failure of his steam vehicle enterprise gave rise to controversy in his time, with considerable polarisation of opinion. His daughter Anna Jane Gurney (1816–1895) was devoted to him. During her lifetime, she engaged in a campaign to ensure the blastpipe was seen as his invention.
+
+== Biography ==
+Gurney was born in St Merryn, Cornwall, England on 14 February 1793. His unusual Christian name was his grandmother's surname but taken from his godmother who was a Maid of Honour to Queen Charlotte. Gurney's grandfather married into money, allowing his father, and to an extent himself, to live as gentlemen.
+He was schooled at the Grammar School at Truro, where he showed an interest in contemporary sciences; and had the opportunity through friends to meet Richard Trevithick and see his 'Puffing Devil', a full-size steam road carriage, at Camborne.
+After school he took a medical education with a Dr. Avery at Wadebridge, succeeding to the whole practice in 1813, and providing him with sufficient income to marry Elizabeth Symons, a farmer's daughter from Launcells, in 1814. The couple settled in Wadebridge where their daughter Anna Jane was born in January 1815. He practised as a surgeon, but he also became interested in chemistry and mechanical science; he was also an accomplished pianist, and constructed his own piano, described as a 'large instrument'.
+
+He moved with his family to London in 1820, apparently discontented with rural life and wishing to seek his fortune. The family settled at 7 Argyle Street, near Hanover Square, where Gurney continued his practice as a surgeon. There he expanded his scientific knowledge and started giving a series of lectures on the elements of chemical science to the Surrey Institution, where he was appointed lecturer in 1822. A son, Goldsworthy John, was also born to the couple in that year, at Launcells (later to die relatively young in 1847).
+A skill attributed to Gurney was an ability to express scientific thought on paper and through lectures. His lectures in the 1822-3 period included one on the application of steam power to road vehicles. He was also of a practical bent, and in 1823 was awarded an Isis gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts for devising an oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. 
+By 1825, he had started practical work on a steam carriage, taking space for a small workshop in Oxford Street and filing a first patent for "An apparatus for propelling carriages on common roads or railways – without the aid of horses, with sufficient speed for the carriage of passengers and goods". His work encompassed the development of the blastpipe, which used steam to increase the flow of air through a steam engine's chimney, so increasing the draw of air over the fire and, in short, much increasing the power-to-weight ratio of the steam engine. 
+In 1826 he purchased from Jacob Perkins a manufacturing works at, and moved his family to living space in, 154 Albany Street, near Regent's Park, and proceeded to improve the designs of his carriages, described below. Whilst the carriages certainly had technical merit and much promise, he was unsuccessful in commercialising them; by the spring of 1832 he had run out of funding and was forced to auction his remaining business assets, eventually losing a great deal of his own and investors' money. The circumstances of the failure engendered controversy expressed in contemporary scientific publications, as well as in committees of the House of Commons.
+
+In 1830, Gurney leased a plot of land overlooking Summerleaze Beach in Bude, from his friend Sir Thomas Acland, and set about the construction of a new house to be built amongst the sand hills. The construction rested on an innovative concrete raft foundation, representing an early worked example of this technique. The original house called "The Castle" still stands but has been extended over the past century. It is currently owned and managed by Bude-Stratton Town Council and houses a heritage centre with a number of exhibits relating to Gurney.
+In this period he became godfather to William Carew Hazlitt, who notes that Gurney was involved in property development in Fulham.
+At The Castle, Gurney regrouped from his carriage failure, applying his mind to the principle of illumination by the forcing of oxygen into a flame to increase the brilliance of the flame, giving rise to the Bude-Light. He also applied the principles of the blastpipe or steam jet to the ventilation of mines, as well as to the extinguishing of underground fires.
+
+His wife Elizabeth died in 1837, and is buried in St. Martin in the Fields. With his daughter – described as his constant companion – he moved to 'Reeds', a small house on the outskirts of Poughill, near Bude. In 1844 he bought a lease on Hornacott Manor, Boyton, 10 miles (16 km) from Bude, where he built Wodleigh Cottage for himself, and engaged his interest in farming. In 1850 he gave up the lease on The Castle. In this period, he became a consultant, applying his innovative techniques to a range of problems, notably, after 1852, to the ventilation of the new Houses of Parliament where in 1854 he was appointed 'Inspector of Ventilation'. He had previously successfully lit parliament and Trafalgar Square.

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+
+Perhaps arising out of the Boyton farming connection he took a second wife, being married at St. Giles in the Field to Jane Betty, the 24-year-old daughter of a farmer from Sheepwash, Devon; Gurney was 61. The marriage appears to have been unsuccessful; there was perhaps some contention between Anna Jane (39) and her much younger stepmother. Jane Betty was removed from Gurney's will, although they were never divorced.
+Gurney continued to divide his time between London and Cornwall, variously engaged in work with clients; experimenting and innovating in diverse fields such as heating (the Gurney Stove) or electrical conduction; and in improving his Hornacott estate. He was appointed president of the Launceston Agricultural Society.
+In 1863, Gurney was knighted by Queen Victoria, but later that year suffered a paralytic stroke; he sold Hornacott and retired back to Reeds in Cornwall, where he lived with his devoted Anna Jane, ultimately dying on 28 February 1875. He is buried at Launcells parish church.
+
+== Gurney's steam coach ==
+
+In the period 1824–31, Gurney designed and built a number of steam-powered road vehicles. He established a business, the Gurney Steam Carriage Company, to develop and promote steam-powered road transport. He obtained patents for various claimed technical improvements, sold franchises to investors to run services using his vehicles and built at least one steam coach and ten steam drags, steam-powered towing vehicles.  The army took an interest in his activities and for them he undertook in July 1829 the first long-distance steam-powered journey by rail or road.   
+In 1824, Gurney began work on applying steam power to road vehicles. Throughout his period in London he resided at 7, Argyle Street, near Oxford Circus. Initially he had a workshop close by, which was drawn by G.J.Scharf. It was a room, suitable for making a boiler, parts of a vehicle or a working model, not a full-size vehicle.  
+In early 1825 he was approached by Walter Hancock, who had just completed his own first prototype steam carriage; they agreed to meet in Regent's Park where Gurney would demonstrate the prototype which he had had built based on his own working model. During a journey of two miles along a well-made road, the vehicle, which was a steam drag (tow-vehicle) stopped involuntarily five times. The two parted. 
+On 14 May 1825 Gurney obtained patent No. 5170 for his implementation of propellers, mechanical legs whose action imitated that of horses. These were shaped like a long "s", ʃ, and can be seen in front of the rear wheels on the promotional 1827 image. On 21 October 1825 he obtained patent No. 5270 for his design of a lightweight tubular boiler. 
+In 1826 Gurney bought the manufactory works at 154, Albany Street, in the Regent's Park district of London. Just to the north was Regent's Park Barracks, the home of the Life Guards and the Royal Artillery. Gurney subsequently used the barracks yard as the main testing ground for his vehicles. In February 1827 the partnership Gurney and Co was dissolved: it was between Gurney and Colonel James Viney of the Royal Artillery. 
+Gurney was by no means the only pioneer in the history of steam road vehicles – Trevithick was first and Hancock a contemporary – but Gurney had a flair for publicity and drew wealthy – and well-connected – investors, such as Colonel Viney. After the dissolution of his partnership with Gurney, Viney paid him £5,000 for a share in the patents and the licence for the Gloucester - Cheltenham road. Such investments enabled Gurney to get ahead with building, testing and improving his vehicles.
+
+Gurney solved some problems which faced those developing steam carriages, but not others. He placed the two double-acting cylinders horizontally in the chassis, enabling him to have the heavy rear part of the carriage, which contained the boiler, sprung. He adopted a cranked transmission to the rear wheels, although this did lead to broken rods, axles and spokes. He developed a lightweight high-pressure water-tube boiler which he claimed was less likely to explode (although this did happen to one of his steam drags after the safety valve was removed).
+Along with his contemporaries, he used crude clutches on each driven wheel which were engaged manually when the axle was stationary. In the absence of a differential, the drive was usually taken to a single rear wheel; the second wheel was engaged only when extra traction was required (going uphill or on a loose surface) or when using engine braking (going downhill).

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+
+Gurney later said that his first prototype weighed four tons and that he worked to reduce this to 2 tons for his steam coach, the vehicle for which he is best known. This took the form of a large stage coach with 6 passengers inside and 12 (he later claimed 15) outside, plus the guide, who doubled as the engine-man/stoker. The body of the vehicle was 15' long, or 20' including the front pole and a pair of steered pilot wheels.     
+The print "The New Steam Carriage" at the top of this section is an 1828 reprint of an earlier print by George Morton. It shows the coach in front of a pub with propellers in front of the rear wheels. The caption states "It has been constructed..." and "The rate of travelling is intended to be from 8 to 10 miles per hour". This dates it to mid-1827. The "London and Bath" livery was perhaps an inducement to get Major Dobbyn to invest: in September 1827 he paid Gurney £6,000 for the franchise for the London, Bath and Bristol road, for which Gurney would build him eight coaches.     
+In tests, Gurney found that the propellers didn't work well and added a cranked drive to the rear axle with clutches to each wheel. At the end of the driven axle were "crotches" (i.e. two metal fingers) which acted on metal blocks fixed to the nave of the wheel. A handle fixed to the hub of the wheel could be wound in to engage the metal blocks with the crotches, thereby driving the wheel. The propellers were retained for use on hills, when the wheels were expected to slip.     
+On 8 September 1827 Gurney's steam coach was demonstrated on "Old Highgate Hill" (now Highgate West Hill), reaching its highest point "opposite Holly Terrace" (where the road steepens from 1:14 to 1:8). On its return, the coach ran away, went into a gutter outside Holly Lodge and a wheel broke. The machine had to be recovered to the works by a horse. In testimony to a Parliamentary inquiry in 1831, Gurney blamed workmen who "neglected to lock the wheel", i.e. to engage the clutch on the second rear wheel, so that engine braking would be applied through both rear wheels.     
+After this setback, the vehicle didn't return to public view until December 1827. Meanwhile, G.J.Scharf drew it in October 1827 and made a lithograph of it "running in Regent's Park on 6th November 1827". This does not mean that it was being demonstrated publicly: Gurney's factory was in the Regent's Park area of London, as was Regent's Park Barracks. The lithograph shows accurate detail which cross-checks with technical drawings in Alexander Gordon's Treatise on Elemental Locomotion (1834).       
+
+Further demonstrations in Regent's Park followed in December 1827, when many reports appeared and prints proliferated. Morton's was reissued with a tree, pub sign and outbuilding added to the background scene. Many others showed numbered parts, together with descriptions (see image). Scharf's lithograph in November had shown two chimneys rather than four, but these prints echoed Morton's image with four. The coach appeared either on its own or in a variety of scenes remote from Regent's Park.  
+Some, such as this print, included a rear view as well as a side view. These views and the accompanying reports are so similar to one another that they can be inferred to be derived from a "handout" issued by Gurney, which included such points as that he proposed to pay the turnpikes half the toll which stage coaches did (as steam coaches weren't listed on the toll board, they were legally exempt).
+
+On 14 January 1828, Gurney's steam coach was demonstrated on another "Highgate Hill" (now Archway Road), with a maximum gradient of 1:22. A contemporary print shows the guide controlling the coach from the front bench for outside passengers and that, apart from him there were only 10 outside passengers. This is also shown on Cruikshank's 1829 cartoon, "The horses - going to the dogs".
+
+On 16 January 1828 Prince Pückler-Muskau reported that he had travelled on the coach:The new steam-carriage is completed, and goes five miles in half an hour on trial in Regent's Park. But there was something to repair every moment.     
+
+=== Projected Improvements ===
+
+On 11 October 1827 (i.e. before the public demonstrations), Gurney filed patent drawings for an improved steam coach. A simplified version of this was subsequently published together with an explanation of the parts (see image).       
+The patent drawing shows where Gurney saw the need for change. The propellers are abandoned. The boiler is substantially larger. A blower is added in the fore boot and the four chimneys are replaced by a single wide one between the two separators. The transmission was simplified with clutches in which the two surfaces were either bolted together or left free to rotate independently. 
+
+The only revision shown in the 1827 patent which has been documented to have been made (in the print of the ascent of Archway Road) was the guide's move to the front bench on top of the fore boot.  The patent drawings have been used to build models such as that at The Castle, Bude and a working scale model at The Science Museum, London

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+
+== Gurney's steam drags ==
+During 1828, Gurney switched from developing his steam coach to producing a steam drag, a small road-going steam locomotive which could pull a carriage, an omnibus or any other wheeled vehicle. A key figure in this was Sir Charles Dance, a retired colonel of the Life Guards (one of the regiments based at Regent Park Barracks). Five years later he told a meeting in Westminster of 40 MPs, peers and others that:    ... several years ago he had been induced to consider the application of Steam to locomotive purposes as important to the military operations of the country, and had subsequently embarked capital in Mr Gurney's experiments ...
+On 22 July 1829 Gurney's new steam drag was on view at Dance's home at Bushey in Hertfordshire. Present was General Sir James Willoughby Gordon FRS, Quartermaster-General of the Army. His responsibilities included equipping and moving the army and its materiel. The next day, General Gordon wrote a highly favourable report of what he had seen at Bushey. The vehicle had performed for half an hour at up to 10 mph, uphill and around corners, with a barouche in tow.     
+Five days later, on 27 July 1829, a procession of four vehicles set out for Bath from Cranford Bridge, just to the west of Hounslow, the main coaching station west of London. At General Gordon's instigation, Gurney's drag was to be tested on the first long-distance journey at speed by steam locomotion.     
+
+Sandwiched between carriages drawn by horses were Gurney's steam drag with Gurney aboard, drawing his private carriage. Dance's account of the journey is at pp.265-268 of The Taylor Papers.     
+
+At Melksham there was a fray with people throwing stones at the vehicle and its occupants. The stoker was injured, the vehicle damaged and it had to be escorted under guard to Bath to prevent further attacks. It remained there for two days for repairs and was then escorted back to Melksham. Gurney claimed the return from Melksham to Hounslow took 10 hours (including stoppages) for a distance of 84 miles.     
+On 12th August 1829, the Duke of Wellington, who was then Prime Minister, inspected Gurney's steam drag at the Hounslow Barracks yard and travelled in a barouche pulled by a drag (see image).  
+
+=== Gurney's Light Steam Drags ===
+In March 1830, Gurney acquiesced to the entreaties of the immensely rich William Crawshay II to send a steam drag to Cyfarthfa, Merthyr Tydfil, to test its suitability for use as a rail locomotive at his father's ironworks at Hirwain.   
+After switching to cast-iron wheels, the engine, which Crawshay reported weighed 30 cwt, acquitted itself well. It is not clear whether Crawshay kept the drag; by the end of 1830, Crawshay owned one. In a letter of 23 February 1832, he reported how pleased he was with its performance during calendar year 1831.  
+
+In the 1832 edition of Elemental Locomotion, Gordon describes the latest light drag which Gurney had built:The shape of the body of this steamer is what coachmakers call a "brisca." It is entirely used as a drag for other carriages ... No passengers are allowed to be in this drag: the coach-box being occupied by the conductor, and the interior by the boiler at A, and by the engineer with fuel and water at R ... Mr. Gurney has placed the chimney in the back of the body, and it is so constructed that it cannot be seen by horses on the road. The water for the boiler is poured in to the tanks through a funnel which resembles a "dickey'' [seat for servants] on the hind boot.The chimney appears to have been a triangular-section hood above the boiler, with a transverse outlet at the top, similar to that on his patent design for an improved steam coach. As Gurney later said, it would not be seen by approaching horses.    
+In 1831 Gurney built and sent the first two of a planned six steam drags to John Ward in Glasgow for use on the Edinburgh - Glasgow road. One of them made a successful trip to Paisley and Renfrew, but attempts on the road to Edinburgh failed, leaving the vehicle damaged. Gurney and his engineer returned to London, having (as the engineer thought) disabled the vehicle by removing the safety valve. Ward's engineer patched it up for a demonstration at the Glasgow cavalry barracks in June 1831. It exploded, seriously injuring two boys. Ward withdrew from his contract with Gurney.     

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+
+The remains of the Lord of the Isles (which exploded) rests in Glasgow Riverside Museum.    This vehicle confirms a detail reported by Gordon. The rear axle, just inboard of where the wheel would sit, has flats which form a hexagon. Gordon's plan shows what Gurney called a carrier, an iron bar forming a diameter of the wheel which transfers torque from the axle to the felloes of the wheel, thereby allowing lighter spokes to be used. 
+In his evidence to the 1831 Select Committee, Gurney was asked about the drive to the wheels:
+In general, were the wheels connected together, or had they an independent motion?    Always one was attached to the axle; they had no independent motion; this will be seen by reference to No. 5 on the arm or carrier of the wheel (which is a part of the axle,) and can be attached to the wheel at pleasure by a bolt, making the wheel also in that case part of the axle. Gordon describes it differently:[the carrier,] being pressed up by the engine against the bolt which is shown above it, must force the wheel in that direction, and thus propel the carriageGordon's mechanism would allow the carriage to go round shallow bends with the clutches on both rear wheels engaged (although only the wheel on the inside of the bend would be turned directly by the engine), echoing a similar mechanism used by Hancock.
+Gurney built three steam drags for William Hanning, his largest financial backer: he paid Gurney some £10,000, with more to come, for a planned eight drags for use on routes to Exeter and Plymouth from London and Bristol. These first three vehicles were tested on the road to Finchley via what is now Archway Road. Hanning pulled out in 1831 in the wake of the collapse of Sir Charles Dances' service and reports of the explosion in Glasgow.
+
+=== Sir Charles Dance's steam omnibus services ===
+During 1830, Sir Charles Dance bought from Colonel Viney his interest in the Gloucester - Cheltenham road and from Gurney the franchises for the London - Birmingham, Birmingham - Bristol and London - Holyhead roads.. He commissioned from Gurney three identical steam carriages for the Cheltenham - Gloucester road. These were to carry passengers as well as tow an omnibus; together with the omnibus, each carriage could carry 38 passengers.
+
+The vehicles were a hybrid of Gurney's light steam drag and his patent design for an improved steam coach. The wheelbase was longer than the light steam drag and the boiler was moved to the rear, attended to by an engine-man in a seat placed behind the drag. It was given a conventional chimney, rather than the triangular-section hood with a transverse slit. This was the first of Gurney's vehicles which is known to have used steam blast to the fire. It led to complaints about the noise frightening horses, which could see the obvious chimney. 
+At the local weighbridge, one of the steam carriages was found to weigh 3 tons, rather than the 2 tons which Gurney had claimed. He attributed this to its having been built "principally under the superintendence of another person". When challenged about its frightening horses, Gurney disclaimed responsibility for design of the bodywork. In this he appears to have been correct: it was very different from Gurney's light drags, its form having been dictated by Dance. 
+One feature of this drag was its brake, shown behind the rear wheel on the image. When released, it dug into the surface of the road like a drag anchor. Gurney's steam coach used a shoe brake on the rear wheels to supplement the use of the throttle to control the supply of steam to the engine. Another mechanism which Gurney claimed could be used was the lever to reverse the engine, but this imposed enormous stresses on the machinery. When tried in 1833 on one of these vehicles, it broke a connecting-rod. 
+On 1 February 1831 Sir Charles Dance started trials of his new vehicles on the 9-mile journey between Cheltenham and Gloucester. A service running twice a day in each direction, 6 days a week, began on 21 February. Over the next four months, the three carriages and their omnibuses made 396 journeys (95% of those planned), averaging 55 minutes for a journey which the horse-coaches did in 60.    
+The service was brought to a halt after four months by opposition, particularly from the turnpike trustees (i.e. landowners and other local worthies). Dance contributed to this by not paying any tolls as steam coaches were not listed in the schedules to the turnpike acts for the road. Hostility culminated in the laying of eighteen inches of fresh stone in a hollow on the road, causing one of the cranks on the rear axle to break. Other factors leading to Dance's cessation of the service were:   
+
+it was losing money heavily: the introduction of his service had resulted in overcapacity and a price war, with fares falling from 2s (2-horse coach) or 2s 6d (4-horse coach) to 1s;
+a revised turnpike act would impose a toll on each of Dance's services twice that which applied to 4-horse coaches.
+
+== Bankruptcy and parliamentary inquiry ==
+In 1831, Goldsworthy gave evidence to a House of Commons select committee, on the use of Steam carriages, and related tolls.
+A charge of £2 was levied on each steam carriage journey, whilst the toll for a horsedrawn carriage was 2 shillings (one-twentieth of the amount). This may be contrasted with a contemporary exchequer loan to the railway developers of £100,000. Maceroni continues:

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+---
+title: "Goldsworthy Gurney"
+chunk: 6/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsworthy_Gurney"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:20.803004+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In addition to this flagrant outrage against justice and utility, the worthy squires and magistrates of the Cheltenham district, suddenly, without any necessity, covered a long tract of the road with a layer of loose gravel, a foot deep, which, adding to the above-mentioned difficulties and impediments, put an entire stop to the undertaking.
+At the same time, press coverage of an accident befalling a Glasgow steam drag adversely affected the reputation of the vehicles. Gurney was bankrupted with debts of £232,000.
+Sufficient was the concern about Gurney's bankruptcy, and sufficient were his contacts, that a further select committee was convened from 1831 to 1835, on Mr.Goldsworthy Gurney's Case. Its final report stated:
+
+Mr Goldsworthy Gurney was the first person to successfully operate steam carriages on common roads, and he took out patents for his invention in 1825 and 1826–27. In 1830 Mr Gurney entered into contracts with various individuals for the commercial exploitation of his invention, carrying passengers at a lower fare than horse carriages. In 1831 more than 50 private bills were passed by Parliament imposing prohibitive tolls on steam carriages (two pounds or more, while horse carriages might pay six shillings or less), and the contractors suspended their operations, pending a petition to Parliament. A select Committee was appointed, and concluded that steam carriages were safe, quick, cheap, and less damaging to roads than horse carriages, that they would be a benefit to the public and the prohibitive tolls should be removed. A bill to this effect was passed by the Commons but rejected by the Lords.
+Mr. Gurney, having kept open his factory until this point was forced to close it and sell off his materials and tools at a loss. The contractors withdrew from the business.
+The effect of the Acts passed by Parliament have been to make an otherwise profitable business no longer viable. Mr Gurney's losses included the costs of keeping his workshop open for six years, loss of contracts, loss of mileage duty on the various routes and the costs of patents. He also lost the advantage of being the first to develop a working steam carriage, as others used the intervening period to develop their own machines, and lost his advantage over the railways. The total loss can be calculated at over £200,000. This left him unable to either build and operate steam carriages, or to protect his patents.
+
+Sections of those Acts imposing prohibitory tolls on steam carriages should be immediately repealed, and such tolls should be replaced by those for which horse carriages are liable. Mr Gurney's patent should be extended at public expense for a period of fourteen years beyond the date of its expiry, or a sum of not less than £5000 should be offered to Mr Gurney in lieu of such extension. Other parties have an interest in Mr. Gurney's patent, and half of the money or benefits should be kept aside for Mr. Gurney exclusively.
+
+=== Coda: Dance's Activities in 1833 ===
+In 1833 Dance came to London with his steam-carriage, and had it overhauled by Messrs. Maudslay, Sons, and Field, a leading firm of steam and mechanical engineers. The work undertaken led to patent No. 6465 by Sir Charles Dance and Joshua Field for improvements to the boiler.
+The result was the rebodied steam carriage seen in a print of it setting off across Waterloo Bridge on the service to Greenwich. This ran for a fortnight from 12 October 1833 as a demonstration of the capabilities of steam transport on the road.
+
+== Perspectives on Gurney's steam carriages ==
+In sum, Gurney produced:
+
+one steam coach
+patent drawings for a second (or revisions to the original)
+a prototype steam drag, which made the journey to Bath and back in 1829
+at least six light steam drags: one sold to William Crawshay II for use at Hirwain; two for John Ward which were sent to Scotland; and three for William Hanning which were tested on the road to Finchley;
+three steam carriages for, and to the specification of, Sir Charles Dance. These were described as drags but carried passengers as well as towing an omnibus..
+Gurney was undoubtedly the highest-flying entrepreneur of steam carriages in Britain, raising and spending large sums of money before his bankruptcy in 1832. Many of those who bought franchises for routes and prepaid for steam carriages received little or nothing in return. 
+
+Writing in 1831, before Gurney's bankruptcy, Luke Hebert, editor of The Register of Arts and Patent Inventions lamented how much money had been poured into Gurney's activities for (as he saw it) so few and such small improvements in technology:Mr Walter Hancock has, with plans more original and single-handed, far surpassed Mr Gurney, and at a thirtieth part of the expenditure.
+In 1840, Dionysius Lardner declared:First and most prominent in the history of the application of steam to the propelling of carriages on turnpike roads stands the name of Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney ...in his Automobile Biographies,  Lyman Horace Weeks comments thatby writers of the period Gurney received a great deal of credit and an abundance of advertising for his work. He was especially conspicuous in the Parliamentary investigations regarding steam carriages. On the whole, however, it is generally considered that he was proclaimed far beyond his merits, especially in comparison with other rivals such as Hancock, Maceroni and others.
+
+== Other work ==

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+---
+title: "Goldsworthy Gurney"
+chunk: 7/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsworthy_Gurney"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:20.803004+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A key development of his time at the Surrey Institute was use of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, normally credited to Robert Hare, in which an intensely hot flame was created by burning a jet of oxygen and hydrogen together. The blowpipe was the underpinning of limelight, and Gurney was its first exponent.
+According to A History of The Growth of The Steam-Engine by Robert H. Thurston, Gurney was a proponent of the ammonia engine. "In 1822… Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney, who subsequently took an active part in their introduction, stated, in his lectures, that "elementary power is capable of being applied to propel carriages along common roads with great political advantage, and the floating knowledge of the day places the object within reach." He made an ammonia engine—probably the first ever made—and worked it so successfully, that he made use of it in driving a little locomotive."
+Arising from his successes with mine ventilation he was commissioned in 1852 to improve the gas lighting, heating, and especially the ventilation systems for the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster. Although he had some success in moving air around the palace buildings, ridding the legislature of the foul smell of the Thames was beyond his skill.
+Gurney worked on many other projects, with interests and patents extending from improved steam engine design, to electric telegraphy and the design of musical instruments.
+
+=== Steam Jet ===
+The steam-jet or blastpipe served to increase the draw of air through pipes, and was applied to improve mine and sewerage ventilation, to increase the efficiency of steam-powered stationary engines and blast furnaces, and road or rail vehicles. After the Rainhill trials of 1829, there was considerable controversy as to the genesis of this invention since it became associated in the mind of the public with George Stephenson—probably through the agency of Samuel Smiles' biography of that man. In her 1875 letter to The Times, his daughter traces the path of the idea: Gurney communicated it to Timothy Hackworth, who employed it in his Royal George locomotive of 1827, from which Stephenson allegedly took his inspiration for its inclusion in the Rocket. This is belied by Gurney's use of a fan to provide the blast in his patent design of October 1827 for an improved version of his steam carriage. The first of Gurney's steam carriages to which people objected on the grounds of noise were Sir Charles Dance's on the Cheltenham - Gloucester road in 1831. This was attributed to the use of steam blast. 
+More recent letters acquired by the National Railway Museum suggest that, in fact, Hackworth may have discovered the idea first and/or independently; and Herbert—clearly not a fan of Gurney—seeks to debunk claims for Gurney's invention by comparing the output of Gurney's carriages with those of Trevithick. Other problems faced by Gurney's claim to have invented this is the clear use of it by Trevithick as confirmed by contemporary notes and also the patent applied for it by another party in the early 19th century.
+He extended the use of the steam-jet to the cleaning of sewers, bridging his mechanical and medical knowledge in the service of the eradication of cholera in the metropolis; and in dealing with mine fires—notably bringing under control a fire known as the burning waste of Clackmannan, which in 1851 had raged for more than 30 years over an area of 26 acres (11 ha), at the South Sauchie Colliery near Alloa. Gurney injected some 8M cubic feet of chokedamp (a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide) into the mine by means of his steam-jet to extinguish the combustion; and after three weeks, drove water into the mine as a spray from the steam-jet to bring the temperature down from 250 °F (121 °C) to 98 °F (37 °C). It is reckoned that the value of property saved by the extinguishing of this fire was £200,000.
+
+=== Lighting ===
+He further improved the problematical lighting of theatres which used limelight, with his invention of the Bude-Light.  Using a standard flame producer such as an oil lamp and by adding oxygen directly into the flame he produced a dramatically increased bright white light. A system of prisms and lenses distributed light to every room of his Castle house. Bude-Lights were fitted in the House of Commons—where it is said that he replaced 280 candles with three such lamps, which lit the House for sixty years until the arrival of electricity—as well as along Pall Mall and in Trafalgar Square where recently refurbished replicas of the two styles originally used can be seen.
+He extended his work to lighthouse lamps, innovating in the choice of source, the use of lenses, and the introduction of identifying on-off patterns enabling seafarers to identify which lighthouse it was they saw flashing.
+
+=== Gurney Stove ===
+
+The Gurney Stove, another invention which he patented in 1856, was extensively used to heat a wide variety of buildings. The stove's most interesting feature is the use of external ribs to increase the surface area of the stove available for heat transfer. A number of these stoves are still in use to this day, in the cathedrals of Ely, Durham, Chester, Hereford and Peterborough, and Tewkesbury Abbey.
+
+== Anna Jane Gurney ==
+
+Gurney's daughter Anna Jane appears to have engaged in considerable promotion of her father's claim to various of his inventions; the inscription on his gravestone reads: 

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+---
+title: "Goldsworthy Gurney"
+chunk: 8/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsworthy_Gurney"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:20.803004+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+To his inventive genius the world is indebted for the high speed of the locomotive, without which railways could not have succeeded and would never have been made.
+In her copy of the Dictionary of National Biography, all references to the blowpipe were amended by hand to his blowpipe.
+In 1880 she donated £500 to memorialise "his" Steam Jet, at the stone-laying ceremony for Truro Cathedral, somehow managing to rope the children of the then Prince of Wales to present the money. (The Prince of Wales, HRH Prince Albert Edward was timidly asked whether he minded, and replied "Oh, why not? The boys would stand on their heads if she wished."). Anna Jane's subscription read:
+
+In memory of her father Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, inventor of the steam-jet, as a thank offering to almighty God for the benefit of high speed locomotion whereby His good gifts are conveyed from one nation to another and the word of the Lord is sent unto all parts of the world.
+A chiming clock presented by her in 1889 to St Olaf's Church, Poughill, in Bude, was inscribed "His inventions and discoveries in steam and electricity rendered transport by land and sea so rapid that it became necessary for all England to keep uniform clock time".
+A final Anna Jane tribute was a stained glass window in St. Margaret's, Westminster (destroyed during the Second World War), with an inscription part of which reads:
+
+He originated the Electric Telegraph, High Speed Locomotion and Flashing Light Signalling. He invented the Steam Jet and the Oxy-Hydrogen Blowpipe.
+
+== Publications ==
+Lectures on the Elements of Chemical Science
+
+== See also ==
+
+Timeline of hydrogen technologies
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==
+
+Dudley-Stamp, B. (1993). Bude's Forgotten Genius – Sir Goldsworthy Gurney. Bude-Stratton Town Council.
+
+== Further reading ==
+
+== External links ==
+Sir Goldsworthy Gurney Archived 9 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine from The Building Engineering Services Heritage Group, from which an early version of this article was derived
+The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. 287, 15 December 1827, from Project Gutenberg, in which there is contemporaneous article on Gurney's steam carriage.
+Review of The Life and Times of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney from the Lehigh University Press
+Iron Horse of Fable?—Article on Gurney's Steam Drag from the Steam Car Club of Britain
+Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney's case—details of the select committee enquiry, from the British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service
+Sir Goldsworthy Gurney—biography from the University of Houston
+Bude Stratton Museum has exhibits relating to Gurney

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Godfrey_(inventor)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Thomas Godfrey (inventor)"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Godfrey_(inventor)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:19.582567+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Thomas Godfrey (January 10, 1704 – December 1749) was a glazier and self-taught mathematician and astronomer in the Pennsylvania Colony, who invented the octant in 1730. A similar octant was also independently invented about the same time by John Hadley in London with Hadley receiving the greater share of the credit for development.
+He published almanacs and contributed essays on mathematics, astronomy and general topics to the Pennsylvania Gazette and Pennsylvania Journal. He assisted the Welsh surveyor Lewis Evans in conducting astronomical observations to correct the longitude of Philadelphia on maps published by Evans.
+He was friends with Benjamin Franklin and a founding member of the Junto club, which was the precursor of the  American Philosophical Society. He served as a director of the Library Company of Philadelphia and was a member of American Philosophical Society with the title "mathematician".
+
+
+== Early life ==
+Godfrey was born January 10, 1704, to Joseph and Catherine Godfrey on the family farm in Bristol Township, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. His father died when he was 1 years old and he inherited the family farm at age 21. He moved to Philadelphia and worked as a plumber and a glazier. He installed the glass in Philadelphia's State House, now Independence Hall. He was employed at the estate of James Logan who encouraged Godfrey to pursue mathematics and science. He became a deist.
+
+
+== Career ==
+While working at James Logan's estate, Stenton, Godfrey observed a reflection in a piece of broken glass which prompted the idea for the reflecting quadrant. Godfrey accessed a copy of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Logan's library to further expand his idea.  While challenged by the Latin text, with Logan's support, he was able to learn Latin and apply Newton's theories to his idea.
+Godfrey began experiments to develop an improved quadrant for determining latitude for navigation. He carried out much of his work in part of a home he rented from Benjamin Franklin. Godfrey completed development of his octant in 1730 and the accuracy of the device was tested by the captain and first mate of the Trueman on voyages to the West Indies and Newfoundland.
+James Logan sent a description of Godfrey's invention to Edmond Halley, the Astronomer Royal in Britain. Logan was surprised to then see an almost identical device described as invented by John Hadley in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Hadley received a patent for the octant in 1734 without contest. Godfrey, along with Logan, wrote to the Royal Society to defend his claim that the device was his original invention. The communication including sworn affidavits signed by the Mayor of Philadelphia that Godfrey's octant was crafted by Edmund Woolley of wood on November 1730. The communication also noted that Hadley's nephew was present at an early demonstration of his invention. His claim was denied, but he did receive a cash reward for his work from the Society.
+From 1729 to 1736, Godfrey worked as a publisher of almanacs. He also contributed essays on mathematics, astronomy and general topics to the Pennsylvania Gazette and Pennsylvania Journal. He assisted Lewis Evans in conducting astronomical observations to correct the longitude of Philadelphia on maps published by Evans.
+Godfrey was a founding member, with Benjamin Franklin, of the Junto club, which was the precursor of the  American Philosophical Society. Godfrey was a director of the Library Company of Philadelphia and was a member of American Philosophical Society with the title "mathematician". Franklin described Godfrey at length in his Autobiography:
+
+"A self taught mathematician, great in his way, and afterwards inventor of what is now call'd Hadley's Quadrant. But he knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected unusual precision in every thing he said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation. He soon left us."
+
+Godfrey died in 1749 at the age of 45. He was originally interred at his farm near Germantown, but over time the grave fell into disrepair. In 1838, John Fanning Watson reinterred the remains of Godfrey, his wife, father and mother to Laurel Hill Cemetery. In 1843, a memorial erected by the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia was placed atop their graves.
+
+
+== Personal life ==
+Godfrey was married and had five children. His second son, also Thomas Godfrey, was a poet and published several popular works, including the play The Prince of Parthia.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brownrigg-0.md

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+---
+title: "William Brownrigg"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brownrigg"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:01.835858+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+William Brownrigg (24 March 1712 [O.S. 13 March 1711] – 6 January 1800) was an English physician and scientist who practised at Whitehaven in Cumberland. While there, Brownrigg carried out experiments that earned him the Copley Medal in 1766 for his work on carbonic acid gas. He was the first person to recognise platinum as a new element.
+He was created a Fellow of the Royal Society. 
+
+
+== Early life and education ==
+He was born at High Close Hall near Plumbland, the son of local gentry, George Brownrigg. William's mother, Mary Brownrigg, was from Ireland.
+William was educated in Latin and Greek by a local clergyman from the age of 13 and by the age of 15 was an apprentice to an apothecary in Carlisle. Then followed two years studying under a surgeon in London before going to Leiden where he studied under Boerhaave, 's Gravesande, van Royen and Albinus. He graduated in 1737 with his thesis "De Praxi Medica Ineunda" – about the environment where the clinician practises medicine. He gained the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD).
+
+
+== Medical career ==
+Brownrigg returned to Britain and took up medicine with an established doctor called Richard Senhouse in Whitehaven. Senhouse died soon after, making Brownrigg the principal doctor in the area for many years to come. His casebook for 1737-1742 survives and was recently transcribed. It contains descriptions of his patients and remedies and some of the earliest English references to puerperal fever.
+In 1741, Brownrigg married Mary Spedding. Mary's father and uncle ran the collieries for James Lowther, whose family had developed Whitehaven into a major seaport. This increased William's local influence and also promoted his interest in the health and welfare of the miners.
+Later in 1771, with the threat of an epidemic from Europe, Brownrigg who had studied the subject from outbreaks of typhus at Whitehaven, published a paper "Considerations on the means of pestilential contagion, and of Eradicating it in Infected Places."
+
+
+== Scientist ==
+His medical interest led him to investigate the gases the miners breathed – fire damp (methane) and choke damp (oxygen depleted air). Carlisle Spedding helped to build a laboratory for Brownrigg and fed it with gases from a nearby coal mine through lead pipes. Brownrigg developed methods of collecting and transferring the gases and supplied James Lowther with gas filled bladders to show to The Royal Society which then elected Brownrigg as a Fellow.
+His experiments on gases continued and after visiting a spa resort in Germany he became interested in gases to be found in mineral waters. A paper he published entitled "Experimental inquiry concerning the nature of the mineral elastic spirit or air contained in the Pouhon water, and other acidulae" earned him the prestigious Copley Medal in 1766.
+
+
+=== Discovery of platinum ===
+In 1741, Brownrigg's relative, Charles Wood, a British metallurgist, found various samples of Colombian platinum in Jamaica, which he sent to Brownrigg for further investigation. In 1750, after studying the platinum sent to him by Wood, Brownrigg presented a detailed account of the metal to the Royal Society, stating that he had seen no mention of it in any previous accounts of known minerals. Brownrigg wrote up Wood's experiments and did some of his own. He was the first to recognise it as a new element and by bringing the new metal to the attention of The Royal Society encouraged other scientists to start investigating it.
+
+
+=== Salt manufacture ===
+
+Brownrigg also produced a major treatise on salt manufacture. He hoped that improved domestic production could make Britain self-sufficient in this valuable resource thereby improving the fishing industry and economy both in Britain and America. Much of the best quality salt was 'bay salt' produced in France and Spain; the two European powers with whom Britain was most likely to be at war with in the eighteenth century. When a paper based upon his book was read at the Royal Society in June 1748 (whilst the negotiations which were to lead to the peace treaty ending the War of the Austrian Succession were still under way), it was considered the most important paper read there in the last fifty years.
+
+
+=== Franklin ===
+In 1771 Benjamin Franklin was on a tour of Britain with Sir John Pringle who advised him to visit William Brownrigg. Franklin stayed at Brownrigg's home of Ormathwaite in the Lake District and was presented with a signed copy of his book on salt. Franklin demonstrated his experiment of adding oil to the water surface of Derwent Water to calm the waves. He later corresponded with Brownrigg on the subject leading to another paper for The Royal Society's transactions.
+
+
+== Other interests ==
+Brownrigg was a businessman as well as a doctor and scientist. He went into partnership with Anthony Bacon from Whitehaven in 1765 to develop the iron industry in Wales which led to the expansion of Merthyr Tydfil, particularly the Cyfarthfa Ironworks. He also inherited a share of John Speddings ropery and invested in the Keswick Turnpike Trust.
+With his retirement to Ormathwaite, he became interested in improving the local agriculture, made a study of minerals, and encouraged Thomas West to write A Guide to the Lakes, the first guide book to the Lake District. He had several society positions including magistrate, Patent searcher at Port Carlisle and Receiver General of Government Taxes for Cumberland and Westmorland.
+Brownrigg died in 1800 and was buried at Crosthwaite church where his coffin was carried by three baronets and other local gentry. His friend and biographer Joshua Dixon felt that his importance and abilities had been overlooked due to his modesty and reluctance to leave his home county of Cumberland in later life.
+
+
+== Publications ==
+The Art of making common salt. London: Charles Davis. 1748.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Dixon, Joshua (1801). The literary Life of William Brownrigg, M. D. to which are added an Account of the Coal Mines near Whitehaven, and Observations on the Means of preventing Epidemic Fevers. Cumbria Record Office.
+Phillips, Richard (1817). Annals of Philosophy. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy.
+Clarke (1834). The Georgian Era Vol III. Vizetelly, Branston and Co.
+
+
+== External links ==
+William Brownrigg biography at Whitehaven and Western Lakeland