Almost 250 years before Senator James Inhofe brandished his snowball on the Senate floor as full and definitive proof that global warming does not exist, data be damned, the Founding Fathers were personally expanding the frontiers of science and technology.5 Jefferson, David Rittenhouse, and Franklin were all famous inventors and discoverers; Franklin was, if anything, as famous in Europe for his scientific work as his political activities. As foreigners observed, this scientific inclination was only to be expected, because the practical and the rational were (then) the natural frame of the
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