Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated
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