“Well done is better than well said.” “You may delay, but time will not.” Ben Franklin is known for his witty homespun aphorisms and creative inventions, but there’s so much more to explore in the life of one of America’s most influential sons.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, a new demographic began to emerge in rural England. They were neither nobility nor peasants, but they were wealthy and owned land. They were not loyal to a lord or bound to a plot of his land, but were known as “frankeleyns” or freemen. In those days, nobility would use their realm as a last name, whereas laborers and craftsmen identified themselves by their profession, like Smith or Taylor. The Franklins were recognized by their independence.

The earliest record of Benjamin Franklin’s forebears dates back to his great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Francklyne, born in the mid-1500s in a hamlet near Ecton. His reputation for rejecting arbitrary political and religious authority became something of a legend among the Franklins, and almost got him in trouble at times.

When Mary Queen of Scots reinstated the authority of the Catholic Church in England, Thomas Francklyne insisted on holding on to his own Bible to read and interpret for himself. He created a compartment on the underside of a stool that could be readily hidden in the event that a nosy civil servant happened to check in on the family.

This strain of subversion, inventiveness, and freethinking lived on in subsequent generations. Many of Thomas’ descendants were non-conformists, handy craftsmen, voracious readers, talented writers, and lovers of learning. They often had firm beliefs, but these were wrapped in a winsome levity.

When Benjamin Franklin’s father, Josiah was a young man, there was a deep schism between the Anglican Church and the Puritans. The Franklin house was a house divided, but there remained a mutual respect that refused to mirror the bitter animosity prevailing in the town at large. Josiah sided with the Protestant dissenters, and Benjamin Franklin attributed his father’s decision to move to America to the desire for religious freedom that Cromwell was hampering.

This was certainly part of the story. Indeed, it is partially true of the great American myth more generally, which is invariably expounded upon in textbooks. Certainly, people did cross the Atlantic in hopes of greater religious freedom, but there was also an economic rationale in the case of Josiah Franklin and the pilgrims more generally. Josiah’s brother more accurately attributed the move to economics than faith. The two went together for the Franklins. Faith and business did not need to be in conflict. Productivity is next to godliness, as far as the Franklins and many a Puritan were concerned.

Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on January 17, 1706. By this time, Boston had been around almost 80 years. It was not a backwater settlement, but a thriving township full of merchants, sailors, ministers, and harlots. There were over 1,000 homes and as many ships registered with the harbor. Boston’s population was 7,000, and this number would double every 20 years.

Even as a young boy, Franklin was usually the ring-leader and instigator among the boys. They lived along the Charles River and explored its banks and depths. Franklin recalled one incident when he convinced his friends to rendezvous in the middle of the night to help him steal large stones from a nearby building site in order to build a stone wharf. They successfully constructed a small wharf, but were found out and punished. Franklin waxed moralistic at the anecdote’s end, but it was perhaps with a twinkle in his eye and a spark of pride at his ability to galvanize people into action that he hoped would stick with his reader.

Franklin also showed his penchant for practical creativity. He loved to swim, and would experiment with methods of increasing speed. One day, he stripped and waded into a pond with a kite he’d made. The kite caught a strong breeze, and gently pulled a floating Franklin across the pond.

Franklin’s habit of frugality also began from an early age. Toward the end of his life, he recounted to his friends in Paris an incident when he found a boy with a whistle. So enthralled was Franklin with its shape and sound that he gave the boy all the money he had on hand. His siblings later mocked him for paying quadruple what the whistle was worth. His embarrassment was deep and shaped him into the penny-saved-penny-earned advocate of thrift we’ve come to know.

Franklin’s father, Josiah, was not formally educated, but he owned several books and enjoyed the life of the mind. He would often invite people to the Franklin home and initiate intellectual discussions among his guests. By design, young Benjamin would listen attentively to the discussions. This was a formative element of his early, informal education.

Benjamin was Josiah’s tenth and youngest child, and so Josiah dedicated him as his tithe to God—the one who would take up the life of the cloth. Franklin was to study divinity at Harvard and become a minister. Josiah was a poor candlestick maker, but he enrolled Franklin in a private school at the age of eight with the children of Boston’s elite. Franklin quickly climbed to the top of his class and even skipped a grade, but Josiah removed him from school quite suddenly.

Insufficient finances was the reason given, but this seems thin. The Latin school was tuition-free, and by that time young Benjamin would have been one of only a few children still under Josiah Franklin’s roof. The family had gotten by fine with far more mouths to feed. What is more, it was not impossible to get scholarships to Harvard. In fact, more than a tenth of the university’s budget was dedicated to offering financial aid. It wasn’t just the elite admitted into Harvard either. A large proportion were the sons of tradesmen, and some were even orphans.

A far more probable explanation is that Josiah discovered that his son was not a good fit for the cloth. In all likelihood, Franklin’s spontaneity, skepticism, inquisitive nature, and, at times, his irreverence would not have jived well with the more rigid clerical structures; and his worldly practicality would have quickly exhausted his patience with theorizing and theologizing.

What would have become of Franklin had he gone to Harvard? Some historians have speculated that it would have ruined him for creative thinking and curiosity. This, however, seems a gross underestimation of both Harvard and Franklin.

After two years of formal education, Franklin began to work for his father making candles and soap. The monotony of the tasks grated on him, and he quickly grew to despise the profession. His father began to take Franklin for long walks, where he could observe the various craftsmen at work.This slight familiarity with various crafts would later aid him in turning his invention ideas into reality.

When he was 12, Franklin began an apprenticeship with his older brother, James, who had been training as a printer. This would be a tremendous boon to Franklin. He was a voracious reader, and it set him up with a profession he would utilize to effective ends. For the rest of his life, he would refer to himself as Benjamin Franklin, Printer. Whatever money he made at the print shop with his brother, he would spend on books.

Even as a teenager, Franklin showed himself to be not only an industrious, smart worker, but also a talented writer. With just two years of formal schooling, he worked vigorously to excise any deficiencies in style and vocabulary. In time, he established a flair for writing with tremendous subtlety and wit. He submitted a number of pieces under a pseudonym, Silence Dogood. The name was an allusion to the writings of Cotton Mather, particularly his book Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good and a sermon he wrote called “Silentiarius: The Silent Sufferer.”  Franklin would later write that any usefulness to the public was a result of lessons from Mather. Franklin’s Silence Dogood was as an old but vivacious, opinionated widow who offered humorous satirical pieces on issues of the day. One question that “she” raised was whether the religious hypocrite or the shameless profligate does more harm to society. There was a small circle of writers at the print shop called the Courant. They would collectively decide which pieces would be published in the local paper. Franklin recalls flushing with pleasure overhearing them enjoy and discuss his pseudonymously submitted pieces.

Franklin’s writing was pioneering in many ways. It represents some of the first examples of written American humor, and was an inspiration to prolific writers like Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

A dearth of formal education in science did not keep Benjamin Franklin from exploring everything from topography to meteorology, from anatomy to mechanical sciences. His lack of theoretical grounding meant he was never going to be a world-class physicist, but this turned out to benefit him as he pursued what he referred to as his “scientific amusements.” Such phraseology typifies Franklin’s good-natured self-deprecation, but it also fails to capture the impact that his tinkering had on the world. He truly was an inventor of the highest caliber.

He was most immersed in the world of invention and innovation in his late 30s and early 40s. During this time, he developed appliances that exist around the world in some form today. The wood stove, for instance, was Ben Franklin’s idea. Designed to maximize heat and reduce billowing, Franklin’s model was eventually modified because the convection mechanism couldn’t effectively expel excess smoke, but at the time of its invention, it was a sensation. The Boston Evening Post jubilantly declared that a statue should be erected in Franklin’s honor. The governor of Philadelphia offered Franklin a patent for his work, but Franklin declined. He believed that the purpose of inventing is for the advancement of the common good, and that people should do this “freely and generously.”

Another example of Franklin’s ingenuity was his improvement of the catheter. His brother wrote him from Boston, telling him that he was deathly ill and in need of some kind of apparatus to help him urinate. Franklin approached a silversmith, and together they designed a small, flexible tube with a screw-like shape to allow for effortless insertion with a condensable feature to make withdrawal less painful.

In 1868, The Nation stated that people either love or hate Benjamin Franklin. Over the 300 years since he was born, opinions of Franklin have run the gamut. His practicality, irreverence, and wit endeared him to many, but annoyed plenty of others. In the time immediately following his death, those who had squabbled with him in life took a more conciliatory view of his life and contributions. The politician, William Smith, who had locked horns with Franklin on a number of occasions, brushed aside their contentions, and gave a beautiful eulogy in tribute to Franklin’s love of his fellow man and contributions to science. John Adams, who had his share of political and religious disagreements with Franklin in America as well as in France, sang Franklin’s praises, approbating his skill in the practical sciences, his gifts of satire and storytelling, his wit, and imagination.

Ben Franklin was a man of the people, and his fight for the middle class has prevailed against the concerns that it would lead to a Visogothic descent into vulgarization. He hoped that the middle class would embody the civility of the aristocracy and the work ethic of the working class. The cultural shift from rationality to romanticism was not kind to Franklin. The new emphasis was on subjective aesthetic experience and emotion over rationality. In the early 1800s, romantic poets like Keats derided Franklin (along with Swift and Voltaire and other Enlightenment notables) for failing to appreciate the loftier, more sublime things of life. American transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson expressed a similar aversion.

The vacillations have continued. Shortly after the Civil War, when the Industrial Age was gathering steam, his ideas about thrift, efficiency, and wealth creation became sacrosanct. Franklin’s heyday ended again in the 1920s, as thinkers like Max Weber began to view Franklin’s views on business as overly utilitarian and his book Poor Richard’s Almanac as epitomizing the “philosophy of avarice.”

The pendulum of popular opinion has swung from one extreme to the other over the centuries, and has forged Franklin into its various images. He has been co-opted to represent the central preoccupations of each subsequent generation. In our own, Franklin has returned to enjoy the vogue among self-help gurus like Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey. In contemporary culture, he is generally seen as a jovial, likeable, if harmless, man with a kite, tempting the forces of nature. One commentator described the popular view of Franklin as the nation’s “Founding Yuppie.”

It is true that Franklin is a far more approachable figure than many of his more stodgy contemporaries (having a lively conversation with Franklin over ales at a bar is readily imaginable), but we should not let these sentiments detract from the fact that Franklin was among the most influential men of his day.