Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s scientific inquiries were driven, primarily, by pure curiosity and the thrill of discovery. Indeed, there was joy in his antic curiosity, whether it was using electricity jolts to cook turkeys or whiling away his time as Assembly clerk by constructing complex “magic squares” of numbers where the rows, columns, and diagonals all added up

These experiments (which were begun in the 1730s with his Junto colleague Joseph Breintnall, based on the theories of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle) included putting cloth patches of different colors on snow and determining how much the sun heated each by measuring the melting. Later,

Franklin’s discovery that the generation of a positive charge was accompanied by the generation of an equal negative charge became known as the conservation of charge and the single-fluid theory of electricity.

In Poor Richard’s almanac, Franklin would later put it more pithily: “Fish and guests stink after three days.”23