Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Benjamin West, 37, whose Quaker father kept an inn outside Philadelphia, has by now achieved a great success abroad. In fact West transformed the whole art of historical painting in 1770 by insisting that he would paint the death of General Wolfe at Quebec in the costumes and landscape in which it actually occurred, thus overturning the tradition that no hero could ever die except in the robes of ancient Greece, preferably with a temple or two in the background. West was a co-founder with Sir Joshua Reynolds of the Royal Academy of the Arts, and in 1772 King...
...Benjamin Franklin inspected the Turtle in Bushnell's workshop and praised it to General Washington, who later described it as "an effort of genius." But Bushnell has been having trouble with the vessel: the pump broke down and had to be replaced; the ventilator had to be altered to draw in fresh air through one tube and eject stale air through another. To help out, the Connecticut Council of Safety decided last February to award Bushnell £60 to carry on his work...
...century B.C., when Thales of Miletus observed that amber, if rubbed, would attract bits of feathers and other light objects (the Greek word for amber is elektron). Only in modern times, however, have scientists discovered that some kind of electricity exists in most things, and in 1752 Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his kite that it can be drawn from the sky. But what is electricity? What causes it? Where is it most evident in nature? These questions are much in the air nowadays, and almost every issue of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions contains some report...
...Letter became the first successful colonial newspaper in 1704, it still takes two men with a manual press ten hours to turn out a typical weekly run of 600 copies. Only three of the nation's 32 papers are printed more frequently than once a week. The most prolific: Benjamin Towne's Evening Post, which was able to insert that brief mention of the Declaration in the first of its thrice-weekly issues right at press time. As is the custom in colonial newspapers, however, the momentous late news was simply inserted on a back page of the Post; readers...
Night had not yet descended over Philadelphia's State House when Printer Benjamin Towne's Pennsylvania Evening Post came streaming off the press with a terse announcement of the action: "This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES." Thus was the fact of independence first spread among colonial readers. By early this week the city's five other newspapers?a concentration that makes Philadelphia the publishing capital of the former colonies?had either reported the Declaration or were preparing stories on it. The Evening Post and Dunlap's Pennsylvania Packet have published the entire text...