LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin - Scientist): London Planetarium
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Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin - Scientist) also shows up in the Retriever categories:
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin - Early) , and more.
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin - Early) , and more.
Franklin was keen to demonstrate his oil on water experiment again (originally done in London). Here, they took a boat out into the centre of Derwentwater. What is interesting about this experiment is that the local vicar was sceptical and convinced the results must have been exaggerated. Brownrigg therefore urged Franklin to write up his experiments.
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His eldest child, the illegitimate William, was brought up as part of the Franklin family, and was close to his father, helping him with his electrical experiments and civic ventures. In his mid-twenties, William began to read law, and completed his studies at the Middle Temple in London after traveling there with his father in 1757. He was appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey in August 1762, and on September 4, 1762, he married Elizabeth Downes. The Revolution found Benjamin and William on opposite sides of the battle, which caused a permanent split in their relationship. Franklin refused to intercede on his son’s behalf when he was imprisoned as a Loyalist in 1776, and they met just one more time in their lives, to settle debts and transfer real estate.
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[One] assault on Franklin is embodied in "Runaway America" (2004), by David Waldstreicher, who argues that Franklin masked his true feelings about slavery, and that he was a slave trader and slave owner in an age of supposed freedom and equality. Here again the author ignores or downplays contrary evidence, such as the fact that in 1763 Franklin visited the Negro School of Philadelphia, which he helped establish, examined the students, and discovered "a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race . . . Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children."18 Franklin was never much of a slaveholder — compared, for example, to Washington or Jefferson — and the few slaves he held as servants were freed in London before he returned to America in 1775. Two years before he died, he became president of the Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery and helped introduce legislation in Congress to abolish slavery once and for all.
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Franklin was sent, in 1757, by the Pennsylvania Assembly to London to persuade the Penns to pay their share of war expenses. In Britain he was received with honors from the University of Edinburgh and from Oxford. He helped put through a bill taxing the Penn family for its lands.
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It is true that Franklin loved England before he loved France. He lived in London for nearly 20 years and considered it home, more even than Philadelphia. His son William was so enamored with the British Empire that he remained a loyalist throughout the war... giving rise to the rumor that his father was a double agent. In France, Franklin met with British agents and listened to their offers of honors, emoluments, and bribes. He did little to hide his activities and papers from alleged spies, whether French or British. And, yes, he was identified clandestinely as "Number 72."
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In 1757, Franklin went to London to represent Pennsylvania in its quarrel with William Penn’s heirs (Pennsylvania was the last of the propriety colonies). He remained abroad for eighteen years, not returning to American until 1775.
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