Benjamin Franklin

Early life and education

Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker. He attended Boston Latin School for two years before leaving school at age ten to work in his father's shop. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. He taught himself to write by dissecting essays in The Spectator: he would read a piece, make brief notes, set it aside for several days, then try to reconstruct the original from his notes — and compare the result to the model. He read voraciously and at sixteen began submitting essays to his brother's newspaper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood. After clashing with James, he ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen with almost nothing in his pockets.

Career

By age thirty Franklin owned the most successful printing operation in the colonies, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette and the wildly popular Poor Richard's Almanack. He retired from the print business at forty-two, financially independent enough never to need to work again — and used that freedom for the rest of his life. He proved that lightning is electricity with the famous kite experiment of 1752, invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, founded the first lending library in America, the first volunteer fire company, the first public hospital, and what became the University of Pennsylvania. As ambassador to France from 1776 to 1785, he secured the alliance that won American independence — charming the French court while wearing a simple fur cap instead of powdered wigs. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention at age 81.

Legacy and death

Franklin died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. He had reinvented himself across at least seven distinct careers — printer, author, scientist, postmaster, philanthropist, diplomat, statesman — and produced one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. The 13 Virtues system he designed at twenty became the template for modern habit tracking; the Junto society he founded at twenty-one became the template for the modern peer-improvement group. His face appears on the U.S. $100 bill.

Claude Code skills

Frameworks distilled from Benjamin’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.

/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install franklin

Books

Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Benjamin.

Notable quotes

References

Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771–1790, published 1791)
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson (2003)

Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin