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Benjamin Franklin, one of history’s most famous scientists, was first to
apply the now familiar meanings to words like battery, positive and negative. He
was also the First American, a larger-than-life figure enmeshed in scandal and
intrigue. Franklin braved arrows and built forts. Yet in an age when the British
would deliberately infect native Americans with smallpox, he spoke out against
racism. On one page in Benjamin Franklin, Politician: The Mask and the Man
(Norton, £19.95, ISBN 0 393 03983 8) Francis Jennings portrays Franklin
the army colonel leading a march against the college he had founded; on the
next, he is picking up an honorary degree. On another he is in London, trying to
pay for the tea thrown overboard in the Boston Tea Party. Franklin’s progress
from British royalist to draughtsman of the American Declaration of Independence
makes fascinating historical reading.