Exploring the intriguing life of Benjamin Franklin, America's founding father

Despite lacking a formal education, Benjamin Franklin is one of history's most famous innovators. He is credited with inventing bifocals, lightning rods, flexible catheters, and swimming fins, as well as making several key discoveries about electricity. He was one of America's most influential statesmen and, by many accounts, a delightfully quirky weirdo. Today, we're going to take a look at 14 peculiar facts about Benjamin Franklin. In the 1720s, Franklin's brother, James, launched a weekly newspaper called the New England Courant. Ben, still only 16 years old, wanted to contribute by writing a column. However, his brother wasn't too hot on the idea. Undeterred, Ben began secretly submitting work under the name Silence Duguid. Silence, who was alleged to be a middle-aged widow, wrote on a variety of topics, including but not limited to marriage, fashion, religion, and women's rights. Despite actually being written by a 16-year-old boy, the column was wildly popular. Mrs. Duguid was even romantically pursued by several eligible bachelors from the Boston area who sought her hand in marriage. After writing 14 essays under the nom de plume, Franklin told his brother the truth. James was none too happy about the whole thing, and without a column to write, Ben quickly grew tired of working for his brother. Within a year, Ben moved to Philadelphia. In the mid-1700s, the most well-known Western artists, musicians, writers, and scientists tended to live in Europe. America, for its part, was barely a blip on most of the world's radar. But Ben Franklin was busy making a name for himself in several fields. And his inventions, writings, and prominence as an ambassador would make him wildly famous in France. His rotund, bespectacled image was used on snuff boxes and other commercial products. And people would even hang engravings of the man in their homes. Franklin was so popular in France that after his death, his autobiography was published in French before it was published in English. Ben Franklin believed in science, but he wasn't above satirizing his fellow scientists when he felt they were being pompous and impractical. It's this side of him that resulted in the infamous essay Fart Proudly, also known as A Letter to a Royal Academy About Farting and To the Royal Academy of Farting, written in 1781 while Franklin was living abroad as the US ambassador to France, it proposed a scientific study of the way different foods affected the smell of human flatulence. The goal would be to produce a drug that could be mixed in with the food that would make the flatulence not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes. While Franklin initially planned to submit the essay as a proposal to the Royal Academy of Brussels, he never went through with it. Instead, he shared it only with a few friends and correspondents, like Richard Price, the Welsh philosopher and Unitarian minister. We all know that Benjamin Franklin made several important discoveries concerning electricity, but not all of his work in the field was successful. For example, Franklin once almost killed himself trying to cook a turkey with electricity. Cooking with electricity was something Ben had been experimenting with, and he found electrified meat particularly tender. In early 1749, he even threw a picnic on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, where the turkey was killed with an electrical shock and then cooked by being rotated over an electrically kindled fire. After that, they used electricity to ignite flammable liquids, drink a toast with electrically heated glasses, and used electrical sparks to set off explosions. However, the process wasn't quite perfect. In a letter from 1750, Franklin describes an incident in which he was trying to kill a turkey with an electrical shock, but instead wound up electrocuting himself. Witnesses reported him being engulfed in a flash of light and hearing a loud crack. He would later tell his brother that the biggest injury he sustained was to his ego. In modern times, sitting naked in front of your window will probably get you arrested. But in Franklin's day, it was just good hygiene. At least, Ben thought it was. He believed nudity was good for a person's health and that taking what he called air baths would ward off illness. While science never verified that particular claim, Ben did make some important contributions to the field. For example, he disproved the theory that the common cold was caused by cold weather. Instead, he supported the idea that people often became sick in winter because they were cooped up together and that the proximity made it easier for germs to spread. Franklin believed the solution was increased air circulation, so he would often keep the windows of his home open and sit in front of them in his birthday suit. You can't unsee that now, can you? As you might imagine, a man who was suspected of fathering as many as 15 illegitimate children, Ben Franklin was really into casual sex. He had several mistresses over the years and a great number of thoughts on how to find willing partners. For example, in his essay, Advice on the Choice of a Mistress, he suggested young men should pursue older women because they were less desirable and would therefore be grateful for the attention. He was also of the opinion that older women were better in bed. Opinions like that now would probably get him in trouble on social media. In 1750, Franklin read an article recounting an incident in the Mediterranean Sea where a water spout came ashore in Italy and caused considerable damage. Scientific consensus at the time was that these water spouts were ascending columns of water, but Franklin thought they were columns of air. After further research, he figured out that similar weather patterns had occurred entirely on land. This phenomenon, which he called whirlwinds or land spouts, are today known as tornadoes. In 1754, he actually got to see a whirlwind with his own eyes. He was visiting a friend in Maryland when it struck. Everyone else ran away, but Ben chased after the tornado on a horse and followed it into the woods. He would later record his observations that even though the circular motion of the tornado was amazingly rapid, its progressive motion was slow enough to allow a man on foot to keep up with it. In 1776, the Continental Congress dispatched Franklin to France with instructions to secure military aid and support for the American Revolution. While Franklin was already famous in France because of his experiments with electricity, He actually got even more attention for his frontiersman style clothing and fur hats. This look was so influential, French women began wearing large wigs they called coiffure a la Franklin. Two years later, Ben switched to wearing a white hat, and French men immediately copied that look. Growing up in Boston, young Ben Franklin developed a love of swimming. He was known to use a kite to skim across the water. And one of his earliest inventions was a set of hand paddles that he used to travel along the Charles River. Franklin was so at home in the water, a close friend once proposed that he open a swimming school. He never did, but he was still a vocal advocate of teaching children to swim and later would receive an honorary induction into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. There can't be too many folks who were inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Chess Hall of Fame, but Ben Franklin managed to pull off both. He started playing competitive chess as early as 1733. During the 1770s and 1780s, while living in Paris and serving as the US ambassador to France, he was known to be constantly in search of players who could challenge him at the game. In 1779, he even wrote an article entitled The Moral of Chess, which argued that the game strengthened and sharpened several valuable qualities of the human mind. In mid 1700s Europe, singing glasses, the eerie sound produced by running a wet finger around the edge of a glass, were all the rage. Franklin saw them used in a concert during his travels and found them absolutely fascinating. He immediately embarked on building a musical instrument that would replicate the sound. In 1761, Franklin unveiled the results of his effort, which he called the glass harmonica. Exquisitely engineered, the instrument spun glass bowls using a foot-powered rod. The musician would simply wet their fingers and touch the bowls, producing a wide range of tones. The instrument was a massive success and was immediately embraced by legendary composers like Beethoven and Mozart, who both wrote music for it. This success, however, proved to be short-lived, and the instrument faded into obscurity. Despite this, Franklin considered it his favorite invention. During his work with electricity, Franklin coined several words that we still associate with electronics today, including battery, charge, and conductor, among others. But coining new words was only one aspect of his interest in language. During the 1760s, Franklin actually developed an entire phonetic alphabet of his own. He believed his alphabet was more natural than the regular one in that it removed what he considered redundant letters, like C, J, Q, W, X, and Y, and limited letters to one vowel apiece. While Franklin did compose a few sample letters to show it off, it really never caught on with the public. Sorry, Ben. We like our redundant letters. From 1757 to 1775, Franklin lived in a four-story Georgian-style house located at 36 Craven Street in London. In 1998, this house was converted to a museum. During the construction, a worker spotted a human thigh bone sticking out of the dirt floor in the basement. Police excavated the scene and ultimately found somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 bone fragments belonging to 10 separate individuals, six of whom were children. The bones were over 200 years old and showed signs of being drilled into and sawed through. If you're starting to think Ben Franklin might have secretly been a serial killer, you can relax now. He wasn't. Historians have noted that at the time Franklin lived in the house, he was friends with an anatomist named William Hewson. Scholars believe Franklin allowed Hewson to use his basement as a lab. Seems kind of sketchy, but just how much knowledge Franklin had about what went on in that lab, though, is unknown. Ben Franklin died in 1790. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that he left 2,000 pounds of sterling to Boston and Philadelphia. You would think that the cities would be immediately overjoyed. But there were a few conditions. First, Franklin arranged for the money to be placed in a trust for the first 100 years subsequent to his death. Even then, only a certain percentage could be used. And even that percentage was only allowed to be used for making loans to local tradesmen. The wait was worth it, though. This money eventually built the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. Not bad work, Ben.