BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
SWIM FINS
11 Years Old
Massachusetts, United States
1717
Benjamin Franklin is probably one of the most famous inventors of all time. Throughout his life, he looked for solutions to everyday problems and ways to make life easier for himself and others. Bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod are a few of his most well-known creations. Benjamin believed that his inventions were gifts, so he chose not to file for patents. Instead, he shared them with others for free. Maybe that’s why so many people remember the inventions he made as an adult.
But what many people don’t know is that Benjamin Franklin actually began inventing as a young boy. In fact, he created his first invention at only eleven years old!
Benjamin: “We should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”
Growing up in Boston, Benjamin loved the ocean. The water called to him, and he spent hours in the bay boating, exploring, and splashing in the waves. He especially loved to swim. And once he taught himself some basic strokes, he felt completely at home in the water. Still, he really wanted to swim faster.
A LEGACY OF INVENTION
Benjamin Franklin is so well known and respected as an inventor that after his death, the Franklin Institute was founded in his name to promote science, invention, and technology.
Even as a kid, Benjamin understood Newton’s principle that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” He knew that when he pushed water behind him with arm movements or flutter kicks, an equal force would push him forward. Thinking about this, Benjamin theorized that he could move more water, creating a greater force, by increasing the surface area of his hands (that is, by making them bigger).
First, Benjamin measured his own hands, grabbed some wood, and crafted two wooden ovals that extended well beyond his fingertips. But it was hard to hold on to the wood and swim at the same time. So Benjamin drilled a thumb hole into each oval. They ended up looking a lot like a painter’s palette.
Benjamin took his new invention with him on his next swimming trip. He stuck his thumbs through the holes and squeezed against the boards. He dove in and used the wooden ovals to slice through the water and pull back with greater force. Benjamin paddled and kicked with all his might. His new gadget worked! He swam much faster with the wooden ovals in his hands.
But the palettes really hurt his wrists and Benjamin couldn’t use them for long swims. Frustrated, he sat on the bank to think of a new solution. Eventually, he created a second prototype that strapped to his feet and fit like a pair of sandals. These paddles didn’t hurt, and still worked to increase his speed. But he didn’t love the way the hard wooden flippers hit the water and soon gave up on them. Still, even though they weren’t everything he hoped they’d be, the swim fins stand as his first documented invention. Benjamin Franklin had begun a life of innovation.
The fins weren’t Benjamin’s only water invention. Or his only creation from childhood. Now that he’d figured out how to swim faster, Benjamin started thinking of ways to enjoy a longer swim without feeling exhausted by the end.
One day, soon after abandoning his swim fins, Benjamin spent the morning playing near a pond with a homemade kite. Soon he got hot, tied the kite to a stake on the bank, and plunged into the cool water. Floating along, Benjamin saw the kite drifting in the wind. Always curious, he wondered if he could swim and fly the kite at the same time.
Benjamin brought the toy into the water, floated on his back, and extended the kite into the air. When the wind caught the kite, it pulled him along in the breeze. How fun! And easy. Benjamin suddenly realized the kite might be the solution to his question of how to swim a longer distance.
FROM WOOD TO RUBBER
Imagine how awkward it would feel to have wood strapped to your feet while swimming. Since it's not flexible, the wood would slap against the water without any give. Luckily, today, swim fins are made from rubber and plastic so they can bend with the water.
Benjamin was so confident about his new idea that he asked a friend to take his clothes to the other side of the pond—about a mile away! At the time, it was common for boys to swim in only their underwear instead of changing into special swimsuits. So, if Benjamin didn’t make it across, he likely would have had quite the embarrassing walk back home. The friend agreed, and Benjamin went back to his kite.
THE KITE EXPERIMENT
Benjamin kept flying kites for the rest of his life.
In fact, his most famous adult experiment involved one! Wanting to prove that lightning held electricity, Benjamin flew a kite with a metal key attached to it in a storm. Luckily, the kite was not struck by lightning—he probably would have been killed if it had been, so DON'T try this at home!—but, as Benjamin's kite flew into the storm, it picked up electricity from the surrounding lightning, which he felt from a small shock when he touched the key. He used this information and other experiments to develop his lightning rod a few years later.
Benjamin laid on his back in the water and found his balance. He sent the kite up into the air and let it catch the wind. It took a little while to adjust the kite—if it wasn’t at the exact right height, it didn’t work, and he stopped moving, but once he found a good altitude, he easily drifted across the pond, pulled entirely by the wind in the kite. It was some of the most fun he had ever had in the water. Even as a young boy, Benjamin had learned that he could invent a solution to almost any problem he encountered.
BENJAMIN WENT ON TO:
Invent eight major devices used throughout the worldOpen the first public library in the United StatesHelp draft the Declaration of Independence and the United States ConstitutionAppear on the first United States postal stamp
LOUIS BRAILLE
BRAILLE ALPHABET
15 Years Old
Paris, France
1824
Three-year-old Louis Braille spent a lot of time helping his dad in his leatherwork and saddle shop. Always happy, energetic, and curious, Louis brought a lot of good cheer into the workshop. He’d often chatter away while he watched his dad punch holes into the tough leather with sharp tools. He thought it looked like fun. So, one day, when his dad turned away for only a second, Louis tried to punch a hole himself. The tool slipped and plunged into his eye. His parents rushed him to a local healer, but it was too late. Louis lost his sight in that eye. Soon, infection spread to the other eye. He was completely blind by five years old.
The accident didn’t change Louis’s personality. He was still just as happy as ever. And he was determined to learn as much as possible, even though he couldn’t see to read or write. At first, Louis studied at home. His dad hammered nails into a large board in the shape of each letter, and Louis memorized them by touch. His priest noticed how bright Louis was and offered private tutoring sessions. It didn’t take long for the priest to realize that Louis’s memory was so good that he held on to everything he was taught.
When Louis was seven years old, his priest encouraged him to attend the neighborhood school. Louis worked hard to become one of the top students. But when the other boys read or wrote, Louis was left with nothing to do. He especially longed to read like the others. Knowing this, Louis’s priest convinced a local leader to write to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris—a boarding school for blind children—requesting a scholarship for ten-year-old Louis. The institute agreed!
Attending the school would mean leaving his loving family for a group of strangers. It would mean trading his small town for a big city. But it would also mean an education he couldn’t get anywhere else. Louis knew he had to go.
Life at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth was hard. The school director was mean. The building was dirty and cold. The students got sick a lot. There wasn’t much food. And the children studied and worked for fifteen hours a day. But it was worth it to Louis. He finally had the chance to read.
Louis: “To give blind people the ability to write, to allow them to surmount this obstacle that so markedly restricts their social relations is … a subject that should have been proposed for a prize by the various betterment societies; people will perhaps find I have made a contribution to solving this problem.”
The Royal Institute for Blind Youth had books with embossed, or raised, letters. Louis jumped into the new reading method, but it was slow going. He had to trace every individual letter with his finger and remember each one until he could create a word. And only a few sentences fit on a page, so the books were huge and hard to handle. It wasn’t an ideal system, but it was all Louis had.
In 1821, two years after Louis started school, things started to get better when Dr. Alexandre-René Pignier took over as the director. The new leader made sure the students had enough to eat and tried to clean up the building. He even started looking for a better way to teach the children to read.
Though most of the students at the Royal Institute were boys, it's believed that a handful of girls also attended at this time.
Dr. Pignier learned about a new “night writing” system created by Captain Charles Barbier de la Serre for the French army. Before then, soldiers had to light a candle or lamp to read messages from their leaders, giving away their position to enemy soldiers. But this new code could be read on a dark battlefield.
The system used sets of twelve dots pressed into a thick paper with a stylus, or pointed stick. Each combination of dots represented one of the thirty-six phonetic sounds in the French language. Dr. Pignier hoped the system would work for his students, too, so he invited Captain Barbier to the school. The captain taught the children his new system, and it really worked! Louis was thrilled to find that he could read and even write much more easily.
SO MANY SOUNDS
“Phonetics” refers to the different sounds heard in speech. Each letter makes multiple sounds. Just read these words to see how many different sounds the letter “A” can make: apple, all, ape, any. Now you'll start to see how complicated the symbols were when based on phonetics.
But Captain Barbier’s system wasn’t everything Louis had hoped for. There were no symbols for punctuation, so it was hard to tell where one sentence ended and another began. It didn’t have any symbols for numbers either, which felt pretty limiting. And since it was a phonetic system, there was no thought for proper spelling. Plus, it was still tricky to read. Using twelve dots meant that a reader needed multiple fingers to read a single symbol. Louis had some ideas for improvements. But when he asked Captain Barbier to consider the changes, the captain wasn’t interested in taking ideas from a twelve-year-old boy.
So Louis decided to make the changes himself. He stayed up late into the night, long after the other boys in his dormitory had gone to bed, pressing dots into paper after paper. His goal was to invent a new language for the blind. The system needed to be easy to read and include marks for punctuation. Louis didn’t like using two fingers to read a single sound. So he experimented with six dots instead of twelve, organized in two columns of three dots each. If it worked, each symbol could be felt by a single fingertip.
THINKING BACKWARD, UPSIDE DOWN
Louis used a stylus to push his dots into paper. For the letters to read correctly from left to right on the raised side, Louis had to press the dots into the back side of the paper from right to left and form the letters backward. Then, when he flipped the paper to the raised side, the dots were in the correct formation.
When school got out for the year, Louis still didn’t have it worked out. He returned home and spent every moment of summer vacation working on his ideas. But he couldn’t get it right. He returned to school and again spent his nights making more and more dots.
WHY ONLY TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS?
In his original alphabet, Louis didn't have a symbol for the letter “W.” That's because in French, the “W” only appears rarely, and mainly in foreign words and proper names like “Washington.” Louis didn't add the “W” until years later when an English friend suggested it.
Louis kept up this pattern for three long years. After only working with phonetic sounds, Louis finally realized he could focus instead on the alphabet. At fifteen years old, he created twenty-five unique symbols for each letter in the French alphabet. And it finally worked! He added more symbols for numbers, contractions, punctuation marks, and capital letters. He even went on to invent symbols for math and music.
Students at the Royal Institute for the Blind liked the new system right away. They were amazed at how easy it now was to read and write. But it didn’t only change Louis’s life or even just the lives of his friends. Braille, the system created by a fifteen-year-old boy, would go on to revolutionize reading and writing for the blind around the entire world.
LOUIS WENT ON TO:
Teach at the National Institute of Blind YouthPublish a paper about how to use the Braille systemPresent at the Paris Exposition of Industry
Copyright © 2024 by Kailei Pew. Copyright © 2024 by Shannon Wright.
