The Restless Genius of Benjamin Franklin
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Franklin's genius is a puzzle. Here is a man with only two years of proper schooling who later received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews as well as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics. In this talk University of Maryland historian Richard Bell will examine many of Franklin's ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering, but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political trail-blazing, and fresh, new business ideas.