Ben Franklin, the oldest of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, would be even older--300 to be exact--if he were alive today. The fifteenth of seventeen children, Ben Franklin was a character in a Horatio Alger story before any had been written. He ran away from Boston at seventeen with the pittance he had made from selling his books, only to leave the city $5,000 upon his death. Nearly alone among the founders in attaining the admiration of Europeans, Franklin's experiments with electricity provoked Immanuel Kant into labeling him "the new Prometheus who had stolen fire from heaven." But he did so much more than fly a kite in a lightning storm. He was a pioneer colonial-era printer, publishing Poor Richard's Almanack. He started the first volunteer fire-fighting outfit in the colonies. He founded the University of Pennsylvania. He invented bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod. He also invented a phonetic alphabet, but not all ideas catch on. He is the only man to affix his signature to the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution, and penned an "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union" that served as a rough draft to the document later enacted. He also wrote one of the truly great American autobiographies. Ben Franklin, renaissance man of the Enlightenment, happy 300th birthday!

He also founded the first public school system with the expressed purpose to teach kids to read so they could read the Bible. So much for separation of church and state!!!

Didn't he also earn a reputation as a - pick your political bent - Womanizer or Philanderer or Man About Town?

He also persuaded Louis XVI to pony up big $$$ to fund our revolution and aid with troops.

Kind of funny too, when he and John Adams were working the French court, Adams was aghast that the man who wrote "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealth and wise" was never early to bed or early to rise.