Benjamin Franklin ran away from his brother’s print shop as a teenage fugitive, arrived in Philadelphia with almost nothing, and spent the next six decades becoming the most famous American in the world. He was a scientist, diplomat, publisher, inventor, satirist, and ladies’ man who helped write the Declaration of Independence, secured the French alliance that won the Revolution, and negotiated the peace that ended it — all while flying kites in thunderstorms and charming every salon in Paris.

This episode traces Franklin from his fugitive apprenticeship through Poor Richard’s Almanack, the electricity experiments, the diplomatic triumph in France, and the Constitutional Convention where the oldest delegate held the young nation together.

• Franklin’s runaway apprenticeship and his self-made rise as Philadelphia’s leading citizen
• The printing empire, Poor Richard’s Almanack, and the electricity experiments that made him world-famous
• The diplomatic mission to France that secured the alliance America needed to win independence
• The Constitutional Convention at eighty-one and the final antislavery petition he signed before death