Some call him “The Newton of Electricity,” and others call him “The First American.” Whatever the nickname, we can all agree Benjamin Franklin was a one‑of‑a‑kind character. After all, he invented his own alphabet, was a chess master, and even lent his name to a psychological effect. (Although he never actually campaigned for the turkey as the national bird.) These tidbits barely skim the surface of his wild life. So, let’s roll out the list of the 10 most outrageous things Benjamin Franklin ever did.
10 Most Outrageous Highlights
10 The ‘Drinkers Dictionary’
Benjamin Franklin was a man who cherished wine without being a heavy tippler. He kept roughly 1,200 bottles of Bordeaux, champagne, and sherry locked away in his Paris residence. In a letter, he famously called wine “constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy,” even weaving a playful anecdote about the Genesis flood.
He wrote, “Before the days of Noah, men, having nothing but water to drink, could not discover the truth. Thus they went astray, became abominably wicked, and were justly exterminated by water, which they loved to drink.” Of course, Noah saw through this “pernicious beverage,” and after the Ark, learned to make wine, thereby “discovering numberless important truths.”
Franklin wasn’t shy about his occasional tipsiness. In a humorous exchange about his chronic gout, he lamented, “What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?” Gout smugly replied, “Many things; you have ate and drank too freely….”
In short, Franklin knew a thing or two about getting plastered. In a 1737 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, he published the “Drinkers Dictionary,” offering 200 colorful synonyms for intoxication. Phrases like “He’s had a thump over the head with Sampson’s Jawbone,” “He’s contending with Pharaoh,” and “the King is his Cousin” peppered the list. Shorter versions include “wamble crop’d,” “fuzl’d,” “pungey,” and “trammel’d.” My personal favorite? “He’s right before the wind with all his studding sails out.”
9 Frankenstein And The Kite
What do Benjamin Franklin, frog legs, and the horror genre have in common? The answer is electricity. Everyone knows Franklin flew a kite into a thunderstorm and proved that lightning was indeed electricity. The popular story places the experiment in 1752, with his son William lending a hand. Using a silk string to avoid becoming a “Fried Founding Father,” he sent an iron key soaring into the clouds, and the rest became legend.
Franklin’s triumph rippled worldwide, inspiring Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani. Galvani began zapping dead frogs, discovering that electricity made their muscles twitch. Those shocking demonstrations spurred showmen to animate corpses with electric currents, eventually catching the imagination of Mary Shelley, who transformed the concept into the world’s most famous horror tale, Frankenstein. Some even argue the “Frank” in the title nods to Franklin’s surname.
But there’s a twist: biographer Tom Tucker argues the kite episode might be a fabrication. In his book Bolt of Fate, Tucker notes Franklin stayed silent about the experiment for years, puzzling historians who wonder why he didn’t broadcast such a breakthrough in the 1750s.
Tucker even recreated the experiment with period‑accurate supplies, only to watch the kite refuse to lift off. Whether Franklin invented the story or simply was a poor kite flyer, the credit for the first successful kite‑lightning test belongs to Frenchman Thomas François‑Dalibard, who sent his kite aloft a month before Franklin’s alleged attempt.
8 He Was A Military Commander
Believe it or not, Benjamin Franklin was an 18th‑century Rambo. Though he never sported a bandana, he did lead troops during the French and Indian War. In 1756, after a series of French and Native American victories, Pennsylvania governor Robert Morris tapped Franklin to command a Philadelphia militia and strike the French.
Franklin’s first strategic move was to erect a fort at the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhutten. Guiding an army of 170 men through dense wilderness, he defended against enemy attacks while teaching his soldiers the art of fort construction. Once the stronghold was complete, he cleared the surrounding area of French forces and established additional defenses, with assistance from his son William, a seasoned Tory‑leaning officer.
Beyond battlefield tactics, Franklin innovated soldier welfare. He urged scouts to bring dogs for tracking, and he tackled morale by distributing daily rum rations after church services, prompting a rapid surge in religiosity among his men. Remarkably, he served without pay, earning admiration from Pennsylvanians and even spooking the British, who imagined he might march on Philadelphia. Of course, such a rebellion never materialized; Franklin remained loyal to the Crown.
7 He Was A Security Risk
We tend to picture Benjamin Franklin as a sharp‑witted diplomat, yet his judgment of character sometimes faltered—dangerously so. The misstep unfolded in 1776, when tensions with Great Britain escalated and the American colonies courted French support.
The Continental Congress dispatched a diplomatic commission to Paris, comprising merchant Silas Deane, lawyer Arthur Lee, and Franklin as chief. In the City of Light, they mingled with French officials, procured weapons, chartered supply ships, and spread pro‑American propaganda. However, the commission’s headquarters were far from secure.
Top‑secret documents lay strewn about, and Franklin routinely discussed classified matters in public. Compounding the security breach, the commission’s secretary, Dr. Edward Bancroft—a chemist and Franklin’s protégé—was in fact a British spy.
Unbeknownst to Franklin, Bancroft covertly examined confidential papers, penned notes with invisible ink, and transmitted intelligence through a dead‑drop, all under Franklin’s unsuspecting nose. Although Arthur Lee suspected Bancroft’s treachery and warned Franklin, the Founding Father dismissed the warning, preferring his friend’s counsel. Consequently, the British agent relayed troop movements and treaty details back to London.
After the war, Bancroft continued corresponding with Franklin, remaining oblivious to his double life until 70 years after his death—thanks to Lee’s diligent record‑keeping.
6 Bones In The Basement
Although he epitomizes the American spirit, Franklin spent 16 years residing in London. He rented several rooms on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse at 36 Craven Street, where he pursued experiments, socialized with luminaries, and even took “air baths”—stripping naked by an open window to breathe fresh air, much to the horror of his neighbors.
In 2003, the “Friends of Benjamin Franklin House” sought to restore the property as a museum. While excavating the windowless basement, they uncovered a macabre cache: the skeletal remains of 15 individuals, including an elderly man and an infant, with mutilated leg bones and trepanned skulls, all dating to the 1700s.
The grisly find was not Franklin’s doing but rather the work of William Hewson, a pioneering anatomist who ran an anatomy school in the basement (the building technically belonged to Hewson’s mother‑in‑law, Margaret Stephenson). Hewson likely employed grave‑robbers to procure fresh corpses for his pupils, discarding the remains in the basement pit. While Franklin probably attended some of Hewson’s clandestine lectures, he was not directly responsible for the bone stash. Tragically, Hewson died of blood poisoning after accidentally nicking his finger during a dissection.
5 Drinking Songs And The Glass Armonica
Benjamin Franklin was a musical aficionado. He could play harp, violin, and guitar, and he frequently attended concerts. Scholars even debate whether he composed a tongue‑in‑cheek string quartet. In the 1740s, he penned drinking songs, setting witty verses to popular tunes. One such ditty, “The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober,” mocked pre‑flood humanity for lacking wine, concluding that “there can’t be good Living where there is not good Drinking.”
Franklin’s crowning musical triumph was the invention of the glass armonica. Musicians of the era produced tones by rubbing moist fingers around water‑filled wineglasses. Inspired, Franklin engineered the “glassychord,” later known as the armonica, consisting of 37 glass bowls nested like Russian dolls, mounted on a rotating spindle powered by a foot‑treadle. Wetting his fingers and gliding them over the spinning bowls generated ethereal music.
The instrument quickly captivated European aristocracy. Madame Marie Antoinette took lessons, while Mozart and Beethoven composed pieces for it. Yet the armonica’s popularity waned as some performers reported unsettling vibrations affecting their minds—later attributed to lead poisoning from the glass. Its decline set the stage for Franklin’s next eccentric venture.
4 Franklin Vs. Mesmer
In 1778, while serving as America’s ambassador to France, Franklin found himself tangled in the fashionable craze of mesmerism. Developed by Franz Anton Mesmer, the practice claimed an invisible “animal magnetism” flowed through all living things, a notion that fascinated the French aristocracy, including Queen Marie Antoinette.
Mesmer asserted that this fluid could become trapped within the body, causing illness, and that his treatments—performed in dimly lit rooms with soothing music (often Franklin’s own armonica)—could free it. Patients would stare into Mesmer’s gaze, convulse, and emerge feeling rejuvenated.
King Louis XVI, skeptical of the spectacle, convened a commission of scientists—including Franklin and the notorious Joseph Guillotin—to assess the claims. Their experiment, staged on Franklin’s Parisian lawn, involved a blindfolded 12‑year‑old boy who was led from tree to tree, each allegedly “magnetized” by Mesmer. The boy exhibited sweating and shaking, yet none of the trees had been treated.
The committee concluded the boy’s reactions stemmed from imagination, not magnetic forces—effectively conducting one of history’s first placebo‑controlled trials. Their findings debunked mesmerism’s supernatural pretensions, cementing Franklin’s reputation as a rational investigator.
3 He Was A Major Troll
“Fish and visitors smell in three days.” “Early to bed and early to rise….” “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” These pearls of wisdom sprang from the pen of Richard Saunders, the pseudonym Franklin used for his wildly popular almanac, Poor Richard’s Almanack. In colonial America, almanacs were the go‑to source for weather forecasts, farming advice, and witty maxims, and Franklin’s edition reigned supreme.
However, Franklin faced competition from Titan Leeds, author of An American Almanack. Leeds’ prose was notoriously clumsy, exemplified by a dreadful poem: “Out of the Frying into the Fire / And he that’s not True must be a Lyar.” Determined to out‑troll his rival, Franklin fabricated a prophecy predicting Leeds would die on “Oct. 17, 1733, 3:29 p.m., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury.”
When the foretold date arrived, Leeds survived and publicly denounced Franklin as “a Fool, and a Lyar.” Undeterred, Franklin claimed Leeds could not have uttered such language while alive, implying the real Titan had already perished and that impostors were masquerading as him. The hoax boosted Poor Richard’s sales, as readers were drawn to the scandal.
Leeds eventually died in 1738, but Franklin kept the prank alive, publishing a final issue that declared the impostors had finally abandoned their charade. The episode cemented Franklin’s reputation as a masterful, mischievous marketer.
2 Balloon Experiments
Benjamin Franklin lived in an era of revolutionary ideas and daring inventions. When French pioneers Jean‑François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes launched the world’s first manned hot‑air balloon flight on November 21, 1783, Franklin was present in Paris to witness the ascent.
Enthralled, Franklin brainstormed practical applications for balloons. He imagined military logistics—using balloons to ferry supplies across rivers—and even proposed attaching a hydrogen‑filled balloon to a servant, reducing his weight to “perhaps 8 or 10 pounds,” allowing him to zip through city streets delivering messages. He also entertained the notion of a balloon‑borne icebox: by lofting a meat‑filled container high into the colder atmosphere, the cargo would stay fresh, and the same method could produce ice. Unfortunately, Franklin’s frail health in his later years required four men to help him walk, and he never got to ride in a balloon before his death.
1 Benjamin Franklin, Tornado Chaser
In 1749, panic rippled across the Mediterranean as a waterspout was sighted off Italy’s coast. To calm the populace, Pope Clement XVI dispatched the scientifically inclined priest Father Ruder Boscovich, who published a treatise explaining that waterspouts, though rare, were natural phenomena.
By 1750, a London magazine had reviewed Boscovich’s work, prompting scholars worldwide—including Benjamin Franklin—to weigh in. Franklin, unfamiliar with tornadoes, dove into scientific journals, compiled eyewitness accounts, and assembled a network of amateur meteorologists to decipher these swirling mysteries.
Franklin’s research led him to challenge prevailing theories that waterspouts were water‑filled. He argued they were massive columns of wind capable of traveling onto land, coining the term “landspouts.” His contemporaries dismissed his ideas as fanciful, and the Royal Society rejected his treatise, leaving him frustrated without tangible proof.
That changed in 1754 when Franklin and his son William, traveling toward Maryland, encountered a violent whirlwind. The vortex rose roughly 15 meters (50 feet) high and spanned about 9 meters (30 feet) at its apex. While his companions hesitated, Franklin pursued the twister on horseback, noting that “the whirl was not so swift that a man on foot could not keep pace.” He even brandished his riding whip at the spinning column, though the storm remained unmoved, sucking up leaves and branches as it roared through the forest.
Eventually, Franklin deemed the chase too perilous and withdrew, while William continued to track the tempest until it vanished. Their daring pursuit earned them the distinction of being America’s first storm chasers, cementing Franklin’s legacy as a relentless seeker of natural truth.
Nolan Moore believes Benjamin Franklin got all his best ideas from an anthropomorphic mouse. If you’re curious, you can email Nolan or follow him on Facebook.