Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at age 17 with a loaf of bread under his arm and about a shilling to his name. By the time he died in 1790, he had helped negotiate two of the most consequential treaties in American history, demonstrated the electrical nature of lightning, established the first American lending library, and invented bifocals — all feats of a single lifetime so varied that his contemporaries already treated him as a phenomenon.

Franklin's diplomatic mission to France between 1778 and 1785 was essential to American survival in the Revolution. He cultivated French public opinion, secured loans and military support from Louis XVI's government, and co-negotiated the Treaty of Paris — all while performing the role of philosopher-statesman with the ease of a man who had been rehearsing for it his whole life. Back home, he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention at 81, still pushing for compromise when the arguments threatened to unravel the whole project. He is one of only six men to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Franklin never freed the people he enslaved until his will — and spent his final years as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, actively petitioning Congress to end the slave trade. That late-life conversion, like so much about Franklin, resists easy categorization. He was a self-made myth who kept revising himself until the end, and the myth kept growing after he stopped.