The time Benjamin Franklin "killed" a man and got away with it.
The time Benjamin Franklin "killed" a man and got away with it.
This is a real funny story I bet you have never heard before.
We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin, that great politician, philosopher, inventor, founding father, face of the hundred dollar bill and many more things. Mr. Franklin was indeed a very intelligent and wise man. However, there is a dark story, well I would not say that it is a dark story, more of a gray story in his past that not a lot of people know about.
In the 1700's, before the modern era of the internet, there were these things called almanacs that were kind of a newspaper, but not quite. Almanacs where published yearly and they contained all the relevant information you may need in a year, think of them as calendars, they contained important dates, astronomical data, exact date of the changes of every season, etc. These almanacs where a hefty business, owners of successful almanacs could amount some serious money, as farmers use to buy them every year to get a heads up about season changes and astronomical data which they believed was going to affect their crops.
In the city of Philadelphia there was this guy named Titan Leeds who owned The American Almanac, one, if not, the most important almanac in the city. Well Mr. Franklin being a young kid hungry for success, wanted a piece of the almanac business, and he launched Poor Richard's Almanac, writing under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders".
Mr. Franklin had a marvelous plan to turn Poor Richard's Almanac into a huge success in just a few years, and it consisted of killing his rival Titan Leeds. You must be thinking that Mr. Franklin was everything but not a killer, hell! his wikipedia page does not list him as a killer!. Well this is because he did not killed anyone.
In the first publication of the Poor Richard's Almanac in 1733, he introduced his almanac by stating that he would have started to publish an almanac many years earlier if it wasn't for the fact that he didn't want to ruin the business of his, and I quote, "good friend and fellow student, Mr. Titan Leeds". Let me remind you that Titan Leeds had never met Mr. Franklin.
In the same edition of the Poor Richard's Almanac, Mr. Franklin included that Titan Leeds was going to die on October 17 of that year (1733), stating that said calculation was made by him at the request of Mr. Leeds.
Mr. Leeds was not very happy with Benjamin's little joke, and at the next year's almanac he stated that Benjamin was a "fool and a liar", boasting that he lived to write the 1734's almanac. However, Mr. Franklin was determined to take his hoax to a new level.
The next year, in the publication of 1734, Benjamin expressed that he was shocked at the terrible things written about him by his dear friend Titan Leeds and he suggested that this indicated that Mr. Leeds was dead and somebody else was writing such terrible things about him, his dear old friend and student would not dare to write such things.
This feud continued for some more years, which confused a lot of people until 1738 when Titan Leeds actually died, but Mr. Franklin didn't come out with the truth there.
On the Poor Richard's Almanac publication of 1739, Mr. Franklin published a fake letter from the "ghost" of Mr. Leeds, confirming that Titan Leeds indeed died on 1733 and that the publication of The American Almanac since then had been a work of impostors.
Poor Richard's Almanac went on to became a huge hit, while The American Almanac ceased its production some years later.
Someone should definitely add "massive troll" to Benjamin Franklin's wikipedia page.
I don't remember where I read this story, if I find it I'll let you guys knows.
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