Benjamin Franklin ran away from his Boston apprenticeship as a teenager, spent much of his marriage an ocean away from his wife, and once froze a thermometer on a warm day just to see if he could. This episode looks past the face on the hundred-dollar bill to the complex, flawed, and endlessly curious man who reinvented himself again and again over 84 years.

We follow Franklin from the Silence Dogood letters and his flight to Philadelphia to the Junto, the first subscription library, Poor Richard’s Almanack, and his early retirement into science and civic projects. We also cover his Stamp Act misstep, his broken relationship with his loyalist son William, his persona in France, and his late turn to abolition.

• How a 15-year-old Franklin used a fake widow’s voice to shape public opinion
• The ether evaporation experiment that anticipated the principle of refrigeration
• Why he refused to patent the lightning rod, bifocals, or the Franklin stove
• How playing a rustic philosopher in Paris secured the alliance that saved the revolution
• His shift from slaveholder to president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society