Franklin: The Essential Founding Father

"Of the many roles Franklin played, he is perhaps most familiar to us as the genius inventor and experimenter. After all, Franklin's electrical experiments earned him the Copley medal, the eighteenth-century equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and many of his inventions (including bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove) are still with us today. But as Srodes shows, Franklin's greatest invention was America, for "it is hard to see how we would be what we are today without the eighty-four-year progress of Benjamin Franklin."".