The young Benjamin Franklin sought his fortune on a trip to England, but instead discovered a world of intellectual ferment in the coffeehouses and salons of London. He brought home to Philadelphia the intense hunger for knowledge that buzzed in a Europe where Newton, Bacon and Galileo had made epochal discoveries. With the "first Drudgery" of settling the American colonies now behind them, Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that the colonists set about improving the lot of humankind through collaborative inquiry. Franklin and a network of kindred American innovators plunged into the task of creating and sharing "useful knowledge." They started a raft of clubs, journals, and scholarly societies, many still thriving today, to harness man's intellectual and creative powers for the common good. And as these New World thinkers began to make their own discoveries about the natural world, new conceptions of the political order were not far behind.--From publisher description.