The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius , Joyce E.Chaplin , Basic Books, New York, 2006. $27.50 (421 pp.). ISBN 0-465-00955-7

Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America , PhilipDray , Random House, New York, 2005. $25.95 (279 pp.). ISBN 1-4000-6032-X

“If your head is wax, don’t walk in the sun.” Neither Philip Dray, a Pulitzer-prize-winning freelance writer and author of Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, nor Joyce Chaplin, author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius and a professor of American Studies at Harvard University, heeded that apt warning from Poor Richard’s Almanack. Both seem to have skipped elementary physics. The consequences are a few soft spots in Dray’s book and frequent meltdowns in Chaplin’s.

Although Dray draws almost all of his information from second-hand sources and embellishes stories to decorate his book for the current tricentennial of Franklin’s birth, he has a good eye for the illustrative detail. He writes clearly and unaffectedly and, luckily, does not stick to the subject in his title. He touches on several other examples of Franklin’s “science” besides his research on electricity and lightning: He covers the Pennsylvania fireplace (or Franklin stove), bifocals, the glass armonica, freshwater polyps, and mesmerism. Dray reports that the bifocals worked well, but not the fireplace; that the regenerating polyps, one of the wonders of the age, served as a political symbol in Franklin’s 1754 cartoon urging colonial union; that the glass armonica, on which the very different hypnotists Franz Anton Mesmer and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became proficient, shared technology with the electrostatic generator; and that Franklin served as a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences committee that would debunk Mesmer’s animal magnetism.

Sometimes, Dray’s Franklin appears more modern and modest than he was. Yet the author’s unassuming book can be read with moderate pleasure and hedged confidence as an introduction to the life and works of the man who, as his friend Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot quipped, “snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

Chaplin’s book is scholarly. Footnotes gathered by her and her research assistants identify many passages in Franklin’s writings not usually considered in accounts of his science. The references may be more useful in other books than in hers. Her renditions of Franklin’s science, apart from his writings on hydrography, are marred by errors that are compounded by presumption. She claims to paint a truer portrait of Franklin than any existing. She aims to rescue Franklin’s life from the distortion of hagiographers and political historians. She will wrest his science from the “specialists” who have made it inaccessible to most readers. That is presumption. The author’s errors in explaining “why we now misunderstand Franklin” (page 5) are too plentiful to survey here. A half dozen of her blunders in physics may be recorded to help evaluate what Walter Isaacson, another Franklin biographer and one of Chaplin’s blurbists, judges to be a “brilliant and thoroughly researched account.”

On page 125, Chaplin writes that “gravitation must create a shortening of the earth’s axis;” on page 132, that “the only electrical fatality [was] when an ungrounded Georg Wilhelm Richmann unwittingly approached a charged Leyden jar” (an ungrounded lightning conductor, not a Leyden jar, electrocuted Richmann); on page 277, that the electrophore “defied Franklin’s definitions of electricity as a fluid that slipped in and out of equilibrium;” on page 278, that the two kinds of electricity, “positive in the metal and negative in the [electrophore’s] cake,” were known to repel each other; on page 353, that “by the end of the 19th century, experimenters in quantum physics were stating that particles of matter did not have absolute mass.” On page 354, she unravels the mysteries of relativity: E = mc2 signifies that “the energy (E) needed to accelerate a mass (m) to the speed of light (c) would be infinite (an amount of energy divisible by the speed of light squared).”

It would be unfair to conclude that Chaplin’s book gets nothing usefully right. Her coverage of Franklin’s lifetime interest in marine affairs, navigation, the course and consequence of the Gulf Stream, and the meteorological cycle is informative and might have been more so if her publisher had not printed the 18th-century maps illegibly. Her accounts of the glass armonica and mesmerism are as good as Dray’s. She correctly insists on the importance in Franklin’s political economy of the physiocratic principle that a nation’s strength is proportional to its population.

Nonetheless, Chaplin’s history is almost as bad as her science: It is pretentious, fatuous, weak in evidence and argument, and lacking context. One example must suffice. By calling Franklin a scientist, she appears to establish that in the 18th century scientists and politicians collaborated. Further, according to Chaplin, professionalization broke that connection in the 19th century, and only in the 20th century did scientists regain political influence. Her account is nonsense. Franklin is a false starting point, and the history of European politics during the 19th century is strewn with men of letters and science.

As a historian, I do not find it gratifying to admit to readers of Physics Today that my colleague’s attempt to make sense of their science has fallen so short. Two more of Chaplin’s blurbists, Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and Lawrence Krauss, a distinguished physicist, judge The First Scientific American to be admirable in concept and execution. The book is full of “verve, insight and wit,” according to Herschbach, and, according to Krauss, offers, a “fascinating … comprehensive exploration of [Franklin’s] scientific side.” Herschbach and Krauss’s uninformed tolerance is misplaced. The cracks between the cultures of science and history should not be safe havens for work that would not survive in either.

John L. Heilbron is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (U. of California Press, 1979; Dover, 1999).