Three may keep a secret if two are dead

Three may keep a secret if two are dead

Thursday 26 May 2011 | Permalink
  • Franklin’s cane and suit are drawn from surviving examples, thanks to the fact that the Smithsonian has photographs of them online.
  • Despite the fact that it’s summertime in Paris, Franklin is still wearing his trademark marten-fur hat (I always assumed it was beaver until I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin). He apparently wore it regardless of weather or season, and it quickly became the height of French fashion — ladies wore their hair gathered up into similar hats “a la Franklin”.
  • “Your odometer” — one of Franklin’s many inventions was this carriage-wheel odometer, which did indeed employ cogs and gears, but was nowhere near as (apparently) complex as the inner workings of Kempelen’s famous automaton.
  • Franklin’s obsession with chess was well-known; he sometimes played till dawn, put off important messages until a game was finished, and once played against a mutual friend in Madame de Brillion’s chambers — while the lady soaked in her bathtub and looked on.
  • “Monsieur de Kempelen” — early in the story, I decided not to bother using pointy brackets (< >) to distinguish when characters were speaking one language or another, hoping that locations and appellations would be enough to suggest the current language to the reader. While von Kempelen could speak French to a certain degree, Franklin had only a rough (and often self-invented) command of the language, so I decided for the sake of the story to do away with the stumblings and grammatical errors that must certainly have occurred during their conversations.
  • “Wrote a pamphlet” — this would be The Morals of Chess, an essay that Franklin started some thirty years before, and finally got around to publishing at his press at Passy in 1780.