What comes to mind when you think of Benjamin Franklin? We know him as a statesman. One of our founding fathers, he helped frame and then signed the Constitution. He was a prolific author, a printer, an inventor (the furnace stove, bifocals … a carriage odometer?), political theorist, satirist and a philosopher. He formed the first lending library and fire department in Pennsylvania, published and wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette, and had a major role in founding both the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College. Not bad for a guy whose formal schooling ended at the age of 10.
But your first thought might be the image of Franklin flying a kite during a thunderstorm; he was also a scientist (or, in his day, a natural philosopher). What many people don’t know, however, is that Franklin was also an early oceanographer. He became that by way of his position as deputy postmaster general of North America. It started with a question posed by the English Postal Authority. How, they asked, can American postal ships make the journey back from England to the colonies sometimes weeks faster than the English mail ships. Franklin consulted his whaling captain cousin, Timothy Folger. He learned of an ocean current that American and Spanish ship captains were aware of. They knew to sail with it traveling to England and stay out of it when returning to the colonies. The English mail packet captains were sailing dead against it.
It took years of blank stares before the British followed Franklin’s advice about navigating the current, but that’s another story. Franklin became intrigued by the idea of a “stream” existing in the ocean. During his trips between the colonies and England he took measurements and notes about the water temperature, currents, water color and Gulf weed content. He knew that the current carries warm water from the south to the north, and that his measurements would mark the location of this “river in the ocean.” He also gathered data from Folger and other ship captains, learning enough to chart the Gulf Stream, and giving it the name by which it is known today. It’s a hoot that the first map of the Gulf Stream, published by Franklin in 1768, so closely mirrors today’s satellite images. Franklin was by no means the first oceanographer. Although it is one of the newest fields of science, formally dating to organized expeditions in the late 19th century, oceanography can be traced back tens of thousands of years to the earliest seafarers who began observing the waves, tides and currents that carried their boats. Oceanography has essentially evolved from the need to find fish along coastlines, past the discovery that the Earth is not flat and can be navigated, past Franklin’s observations about currents, to today’s need to understand the place of the oceans in global climate.
The history of oceanography is as interesting as the discipline itself. In this issue, for our perspective as divers, author Robert Rossier examines what we know about tides, currents and waves, and most of what we know is from the observations made by Franklin and countless others who came before and after he turned his remarkable intellect to the sea.
Franklin’s unique genius was turning his observations to practical use. While the next guy to research electricity with a kite in a storm was killed doing it, Franklin invented the lightning rod. In the same way, the publication of his accumulated oceanographic findings, “Maritime Observations,” contains Franklin’s ideas for sea anchors, watertight compartments, catamaran hulls, shipboard lightning rods, and even a soup bowl that stays in place in rough seas. Oceanographic observation has done much for our lives, and we have benefited as divers — certainly for our ability to understand and continue learning about what we are most privileged to observe.
