A biography of the eighteenth-century printer, inventor, and statesman who played an influential role in the early history of the United States.

A beginning biography of young Ben Franklin who loves doing experiments and cannot wait to test out his latest idea involving a kite!

Paul C. Pasles is associate professor of mathematical sciences at Villanova University. Few American lives have been as celebrated--or as closely scrutinized--as that of Benjamin Franklin. Yet until now Franklin's biographers have downplayed his interest in mathematics, at best portraying it as the idle musings of a brilliant and ever-restless mind. In Benjamin Franklin's Numbers, Paul Pasles reveals a side of the iconic statesman, scientist, and...

Focuses on Benjamin Franklin's role as an inventor of whimsical gadgets and practical contraptions, with an emphasis on his experiment of flying a kite during a rainstorm.

Publisher Annotation: Young Benjamin Franklin wants to be a sailor, but his father won?t hear of it. The other trades he tries ? candle maker, joiner, boot closer, turner ? bore him through and through. Curious and inventive, Ben prefers to read, swim, fly his kite, and fly his kite while swimming. But each time he fails to find a profession, he takes some important bit of knowledge with him. That tendency is exactly what leads him to become the astonishingly...