He was born in Geary City, Doniphan County, Kansas, the eldest of four children of Thomas Henry and Cynthia Ann (Curtis) Franklin. His father, son of a Philadelphia shoe merchant, had gone as a young man, in 1857, to Kansas, where he erected a sawmill on the Missouri River.
Here young Franklin acquired a love of outdoor life which he never outgrew and developed a pioneering spirit which was manifested by unbounded courage, native resourcefulness, and an alert and inquiring mind.
Education
He and his younger brother William, who later became professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collected crinoids and other fossils from the limestone bluffs along the river; and, guided somewhat by issues of the Scientific American, to which their father wisely subscribed, they made Leyden jars, electric batteries, an induction coil, and "dabbled with chemicals" in a corner of their father's office.
Franklin received his early education in public schools and worked in a drug store from 1880 to 1884, running at the same time a small job-printing shop and playing a cornet in the village band.
At the age of twenty-two he entered the University of Kansas, from which he graduated as a major student in chemistry in 1888.
Now sure that his future career lay in the field of chemistry, he went with his brother to study in Germany. He spent the academic year 1890-91 at the University of Berlin, where he worked in Johann Tiemann's laboratory and attended lectures on calculus by Max Planck and on inorganic and organic chemistry by August von Hofmann, the latter particularly so that he might learn something of von Hofmann's famous lecture technique.
His year abroad opened up a new life to Franklin, not only through his work in the university but through evenings spent at the opera and concerts, visits to art galleries, and an extended tour, partly afoot, of Germany and Switzerland.
On his return to the United States, after two more years as teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, Franklin went to study with Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins, where he received the doctorate in chemistry in 1894.
He served for the next two years as a teaching assistant in chemistry, carried out water and mineral analyses on samples sent to the university, and received the degree of M. S. in 1890.
Career
They even built a telegraph line two miles long and became fairly expert in using the Morse code; and in 1877, only a year after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, they made a pair of Bell telephones and connected them with a line from their home to the sawmill.
Again returning to Kansas, as associate professor of organic chemistry, he became professor of physical chemistry in 1899. In 1903 he went to Stanford University as associate professor of organic chemistry.
He advanced to professor in 1906, and, except for an absence of two years (1911 - 13) as chief of the division of chemistry in the Hygienic Laboratory of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service in Washington, D. C. , he continued at Stanford until his retirement in 1929.
As a teacher Franklin was of the first rank. His lectures were models of clear, precise, orderly thinking, often spiced by flashes of humor and "western" vernacular. They were made peculiarly effective by numerous and striking experiments, in which his ingenuity and mechanical skill were a constant source of admiration. Franklin's scientific work dealt mainly with what is now known as the ammonia system of acids, bases, and salts.
Franklin was not only a great scientist but also a delightful human being, with an informality which was wholesome, warm-hearted, friendly, even playful, and always frank and sincere.
A certificate awarded by the Sierra Club of California certifying that he had climbed five or more mountains over 14, 000 feet high was one of his prized possessions.
In the last three years of his life, while in his seventies, he drove his automobile on long tours over this country and Canada, often into wild, mountain regions.
He returned from his last such trip in apparent good health, but two months later he succumbed to an attack of coronary thrombosis at his home on the Stanford campus. Cremation followed at the nearby Alta Mesa Cemetery.
Achievements
Though he had begun at Kansas, it was during the three ensuing decades at Stanford that he built up the great edifice of ammono-chemistry which will stand as one of the major contributions to chemistry in his generation. It led not only to the synthesis by him and his co-workers of a large number of compounds new to science and the development of precise data in regard to their properties, but to new concepts of fundamental importance in regard to the structure and relationship of nitrogenous compounds. His research work was remarkably individualistic.
Rarely did he pursue work left undone by others, preferring pioneering investigations--here he reflected the training of his boyhood. The results of his research found publication in ninety-one papers and a monograph, The Nitrogen System of Compounds (1935). The latter, upon which he worked intermittently for ten years, embodies practically the whole research work of his life; it is one of the classics of American chemistry.
Many distinguished honors came to Franklin, among them the Nichols Medal (1924) and the Willard Gibbs Medal (1932) of the American Chemical Society; the presidency of the American Chemical Society (1923); membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and honorary degrees from Northwestern (1925), Western Reserve (1926), and Wittenberg (1927).
Membership
He was elected as a president of the American Chemical Society and became a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Connections
In 1897 he had married Effie June Scott of Iola, Kansas, a sister of Congressman Charles F. Scott. They had three children, Anna Comstock, Charles Scott, and John Curtis. His daughter and younger son survived him.
Father:
Thomas Henry Franklin
mother
Cynthia Ann (Curtis) Franklin
Wife:
Effie June Scott
daughter
Anna Comstock Franklin
son
Charles Scott Franklin
son
John Curtis Franklin
