Episode Details

In June 1752, a forty-six-year-old retired printer stood in a shed on the edge of Philadelphia and flew a silk kite into a thunderstorm — and when the spark jumped from the key to his knuckle, Benjamin Franklin proved that the lightning that had terrified humanity since the beginning of time was nothing but electricity, and could be tamed. This is the story of the curious Americans: the lawyers and farmers and country doctors who, with no universities and no academies and no permission, turned the unmapped New World into the most exciting laboratory on earth — John Winthrop opening his library, Peter Collinson carrying books across the Atlantic at a loss, John Bartram earning Linnaeus’s verdict as the greatest botanist in the world, and Franklin, the candlemaker’s son, becoming the most famous man in the Atlantic and giving his discoveries away. It is also the close of the season. The whole inheritance of the West, finally assembled on open ground, in the hands of a practical, experimental, self-governing people — and an empire about to hand them a reason to use it. Where did the Declaration come from? Here is the answer.