Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on 17 January 1706. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, and at 17 he ran away to Philadelphia to start again. From the age of 23 he published The Pennsylvania Gazette, and he wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack under the name “Richard Saunders”. His studies of electricity made him a major figure of the American Enlightenment, and his inventions include the lightning rod.
He was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris with Britain and the Constitution, and he was the first United States ambassador to France. He began his Autobiography in England in 1771, took it up again in France in 1784 and in Philadelphia in 1788, and stopped with the story at 1757. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790, at 84.