Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was an American printer, writer, scientist and statesman, one of the founders of the United States. The fifteenth child of a Boston candlemaker, he ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen, built a successful printing business and published the Pennsylvania Gazette and the annual Poor Richard's Almanack, whose maxims he gathered in The Way to Wealth. His experiments with electricity made him famous throughout Europe. He served as colonial agent in London, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, negotiated the French alliance as minister in Paris and signed the Constitution at eighty-one. His unfinished Autobiography remains the classic account of an American self-made life.