I've always been a Benjamin Franklin fan, but I guess I've always admired the caricature of Franklin: from the rags-to-riches Poor Richard writing witty sayings in his almanacs to the benevolent old founding father who charmed the ladies in France. Sure, I knew he flew a kite in a thunderstorm having something to do with electricity, and I've heard of the Franklin stove, but I always saw Franklin as just sort of a scientific dabbler, an eccentric Renaissance Man who did experiments as a hobby.

A new book that focuses almost exclusively on Franklin's scientific achievements, The First Scientific American by Joyce E. Chaplin, shows me how little I knew. The truth is, although Franklin was an industrious man who came from nothing to be a successful printer and businessman in America, we wouldn't know him as a hero of the American Revolution if not for his many groundbreaking scientific achievements, which made him legendary throughout Europe. In fact, Franklin's contribution to the Revolution wasn't on the battlefield, it was in France, where he spent the entire war using his fame as a means to continually lobby the French for more help, more help, more help.

Of course it was Franklin's work ethic and skill with words that first got him noticed, most famously with his Poor Richard's Almanac, offering words of wisdom such as "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." And his work made him quite wealthy, so much so that he was able to retire from daily work by about age 40 and pursue his interest in the sciences.

Chaplin makes it clear that Franklin wasn't content with money — he wanted recognition for his scientific skills from the other great minds of the day. So he worked as hard on cultivating the right relationships as he did in doing experiments, and in the end, he was very good at both. It's difficult to comprehend today, but in Franklin's day, plenty of people played amateur scientist — "natural philosophy" was their phrase for science — and, if you knew the right people, you could make a name for yourself.

This is exactly what Franklin did. Conducting experiments in America while continually trading notes with the great minds of Europe (who took a while to take him seriously), Franklin was able to slowly but surely squeeze into the club.