I highly recommend The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. His writing style completely transported me to the time and place of early America. He led a truly interesting and inspiring life which I think HN readers would find fascinating. I think he embodied the entrepreneurial spirit.
He was an towering intellect and positively influenced any situation he was placed in - the odometer, the mapping of the gulf stream, counterfeit detection for paper bills are so far removed from his background in publishing, and later role as statesman - I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact; certainly no contemporary leaders who will be remembered so fondly 200 years from today.
>I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact
We ask for people to be more and more specialized. But problem-solving skills are a lot more universal than the specialization frenzy of today assumes.
I think the biggest hurdle to having universal geniuses nowadays is being allowed to work on problems where you're not certified or specifically educated on them in some sense.
We don't just let anybody have a crack at a problem anymore. How can you work on an odometer if you're not an automotive engineer? How can you work on anti-counterfeit measures if you're not a fraud expert?
IMO problem-solving abilities don't merely work well across disciplines, you might actually be able to detect similarities between problems across domains if you've worked on both domains.
I had read the whole book many years ago. Found it in a second hand book shop.
It was quite interesting. He was talented and accomplished in many ways.
His famous letter to a young man on the pros and cons of marriage vs. choosing a mistress was interesting and highly controversial, probably both at that period, and also in later decades and centuries.
I found his style very modern - it reads really well even today.
I remember reading his Autobiography as a young student and I was thinking - well, if this is the kind of people who where the Founding Fathers, then no wonders US became a world superpower.
Another recommended read would be the 'newer' version - by another big thinker, inspired by Franklin - Charlie's Munger 'Poor Charlie'a Almanack':
Thank you!
I almost gave up because there was a lot of formatting issues when sending epub3 or kindle versions to my Kindle using Calibre. What saved me was using epub3 format and sending it through Send-To-Kindle. Now it looks terrific.
1) seeding his former apprentices with funding in exchange for a small amount of equity in their new printing ventures,
2) forming non-profit organizations to address public needs (such as subscription libraries, fire departments, and street sweepers)
3) forming groups of like minded tradespeople who were interested in improving themselves and their communities through ventures like 1) and 2)
...then one might even say that Benjamin Franklin was a kind of 18th century YCombinator
That's where I learned he was a self-righteous pompous prick who was probably shunned by his peers and never invited to the good parties. Kicked out of his own family when he was a young self-righteous pompous prick and never reconciled, he undertook the weeks-long journey from Boston to Philadelphia (including a shipwreck and washing up on the islands off the shore of Brooklyn, New York) he eventually ended up bonking his landlord's daughter and had to flee to live in the UK for a while (remember, he was British not American, just like all the other white men in the 13 colonies at the time) . Also, he was a proselytizing vegan teetotaller.
I also learned a lot of interesting history they don't teach in school, like how he was involved with an effort to form an alliance between the English colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy for the defense of North America but the collective colonial governments rejected the alliance and favoured bringing in overseas troops to conquer the Iroquois instead. He was a really smart guy as well as a self-righteous pompous prick, and he would certainly not have fit into today's USA what with his "radical left" "socialist" "woke" views. Not sure he fit into his contemporary society either because of those views.
Back in the day when we had paper currency (before Apple Pay), you would find this guy on the most expensive denomination: $100. $100 used to be a lot of money.
$100 still is a lot of money. It's not as much as it used to be (thanks for nothing, inflation) to be sure. But I would be upset if I lost $100 in a way that I wouldn't be if I lost $1 or even $10.
Anyway, your post is serendipitous: Not very long ago (well, mid-May) I was looking for scans of Poor Richard's Almanack and I found the same things you did: The www.rarebookroom.org site, and its unfortunate UI. Thanks for putting the files up in a more convenient fashion.
I suppose you understand that there is no objective rule to transliterate 'al-manakh' into IE dialects, so I must guess you are joking.
Benjamin Franklin, you know: Founding Father [of the USA], signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution; first postmaster general of the USA; first US ambassador to France; secretary and president of the American Philosophical Society; inventor of the lightning rod and bifocal eyeglasses; founder of the Library Company and the University of Pennsylvania... Polymath, inspirational figure...
And surely you know that jokes in these pages make sense only if they fulfill the purpose HN has.
Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Mominus. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes...
[but seriously: did you ever figure out whether it was more likely Loki had thought of the goat shtick beforehand or not?]
Also famous for getting electricity signs wrong, not understanding that electrons existed and had charges that were "negative" according to his definition.
He didn't get it wrong - it is entirely arbitrary. Though it might be fair to say that it would be more useful to beginners studying electromagnetism if he had reversed the signs.
If we let jokes go unleashed we would drown in jokes in these pages. You confuse "taking oneself seriously" and "taking the opportunity (of being here) responsibly".
...You seem to be confusing "restraint" with something else.
No, not just that - but also that: the slope can be slippery, irregardless of its misuse in some arguments.
The pivots here are «intellectual curiosity» and «a good... comment teaches us something». Of course some of us believe also those mandates should be taken with flexibility and common sense - but one should not forget them and the more general spirit behind them when posting. A rubberband should bind to them - if it's not there, there's probably a misunderstanding of the opportunity given.
Some denounce the "slippery slope" arguments as a fallacy in arguments - but denouncing a slope is only sometimes a fallacy, not always (it is a weak correlation). In case elzbardico intended to imply that the original proposal was a fallacy, he was replied the relevant slope is real. "If we unleash without restraint here, the place will fill with noise". Reasonable restraint makes this place a better place for its purpose.
Very likely referring to the "misuse" that made their brain hiccup:
Irregardless is a word sometimes used in place of regardless or irrespective which has caused controversy since the early twentieth century, though the word appeared in print as early as 1795.
The usage dispute over irregardless was such that in 1923 Literary Digest published an article titled "Is There Such a Word as Irregardless in the English Language?" The OED goes on to explain the word is primarily a North American colloquialism.
It's up there with "I could care less" on the list of silly things that non native English speakers (ie. Americans) say that upset native (ie. English) English speakers.
To be fair, there's more variations of English in the UK than in the whole of North America so it's a quaint bit of Queen's English snobbery from the Oxbridge and wannabe's set.
Thank you! I never researched that specific word, and I thought it was a merge of 'irregard' and 'regardless' (at the semantic level of construction) which happened as the 'ir-' got used as an intensive prothesis (at the euphonic level), overriding its original negative sense.
It seems like a case in which the prothesis is an effective intensifier, but compromised in the final logical flow of the word.
One of my favourite Ben Franklin stories was they were approaching a crucial vote where he didn't have the support he needed. He figured out he needed the vote of a specific person who had always been his enemy.[1]
What he did was write the guy a letter saying that he had always wanted to read a particular book that this dude had in his library and ask to borrow it. After borrowing the book he returned it with a courteous letter of thanks and not only did the person support his vote but became his lifelong friend.
Ben Franklin explained to others that asking the guy for a favour made all the difference because there was no way his brain could rationalise him doing a favour for someone he didn't like and therefore they became friends.
Franklin also said that if you want someone to like you, then you should ask them to do you a small favor because then you'll be indebted to them, and that makes you less threatening.
But if you do someone else a favor, they will tend to resent you because then they will be indebted to you. So only do favors for your friends.
Interestingly by comparison ₤10 8s. 4d was around 14 days work (using the 1752 Massachusetts wage for agricultural workers from [1], which is the earliest I could find).
Now the current minimum agricultural is Massachusetts is $8/hour. $8 * 8 * 14 = $896, which is pretty close to that $851 number (especially considering that was 1735 and I'm using 1752 wages).
I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money. It would be interesting to see the math behind this though. When I tried myself I got £3.63 ($4.66 USD) but that is taking into the account the inflation of the UK pound, not the local Boston pound (https://crowd-media.loc.gov/cm-uploads/resources/colonial_cu...).
Before decimalization, a pound was 240 pence, so fivepence should be 0.02p today (5/240). Here we can find that in 1735 one pound is £181.43 in today's money:
> I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money.
No, it didn't say that, that was the total. It said that 500 copies of the book at fivepence was worth ₤10 8s. 4d, and the maths checks out on that: 5500=2500 pence (written 2500d as old pence). There are 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in shilling, so 2400d = £10, with 100d remaining. 8 shillings is 96d, so from 100d leaves 4d remaining, which matches exactly what was originally written.
The post-decimalisation equivalent preserved 20 shillings to a pound, so 1s=5p. An interesting fact is the new 5p coins were the same size, and existing shillings continued to be legal tender for another two decades, until the size of the 5p coin was changed. So, the parent to your post was totally wrong with the $10.84, it should be £10 + 40p + 1½p (closest to 5p4/12), so £10.41½ after decimalisation. The closest conversion rate I could find to the time the US introduced the dollar was £1 = $4.55, because it was done at the prevailing values of gold and silver at the time.
Using your link, and adding precision to the numbers, £10415 in 1735 would be £1,889,613 today, so £108s4d then would be £1889.61 today as the total gift. Dividing by the 500 copies gives £3.78 each today, which is close to your approximation (most of the difference will be the accuracy lost in rounding 5/240 to 0.02).
The inflation rates are also certain to have been difference in the US though, if for no other reason that the current exchange rate is approx. £1 = $1.28, so at the very least it's close to a factor of 4 out in the period since the US dollar was introduced.
I had tried out that Bank of England page, while I was writing the article, but I decided not to mention it. It wasn't clear to me that £10 in London in 1735 would mean the same thing as £10 in Philadelphia, where hard money was probably much scarcer. So I left it out.
It should be approximately the same in theory - £1 was pegged to the price of silver, although of course there might be local differences in demand causing the price of silver to vary relative to the price of gold. In practice, I think the values should be approximately the same, as significant regional variations would be normalised to speculators moving them around from place to place to make a profit until the demand reached an equilibirium.
But the price of goods is going to be completely different because of availability, shipping costs, import duties, etc. etc. etc.
Franklin's Autobiography has that famous story about his first day in Philadelphia when he tried to buy three pennies' worth of bread and was taken by surprise hen he got three giant rolls instead of the tiny loaf he was expecting. And that was just the difference between Boston and Philadelphia.
Plot twist: when did the British pound, the Scottish shilling and the Welsh penny stop floating against each other and become a single currency? Was that before 1750?
I don't know about those particular currencies uniting, but I'd thought the general l.s.d. breakdown went back to the Romans (and had also been popular in Continental Europe, before decimalisation there).
Something I find impressive about Benjamin Franklin is that he was born in 1706, meaning he was 70 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. And after that he went on to be Ambassador to France for 9 years!
Traveling to Europe from the USA wasn't exactly an easy route back then.
That calendar adjustment is interesting. The Julian calendar drifts from the true tropical calendar by 0.00781 days per year or about 1 day every 128 years. The adjustment was 11 days, meaning that 11*128=1408 years had elapsed since the Julian started in 45 BC. Making the year of the reform 1363 AD, not 1752. The council of Nicea is mentioned, but they only noted the calendar problem, they did not try to fix it. If that's the case then we are actually living in the 17th century, around 1677.
