DISCLAIMER: The following blog post may be too immature for boring and serious folk.

Ben Franklin (1706-1790) is known for a lot of things. He was an inventor, a founding father, an ambassador, et cetera. In his life, he has written many letters, and the following example is one of the more… interesting ones.

“A Letter to a Royal Academy” was written by Franklin around 1781, and it was written after the Royal Academy of Brussels requested scientific papers. Franklin knew that scientific papers in that day and age were becoming more serious and mature, and, oh, I don’t know… scientific? But anyway, he penned this paper to discuss solving the problem of

–hope you’re sitting down–

FARTS.

Franklin opens with:

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year […] Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age.

Already off to a boring start, but here’s where it gets good:

It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

The essay continues with Franklin suggesting that people should “…discover some Drug wholesome & not disagreable, to be mix’d with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes.” He also states that “He that dines on stale Flesh, especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a Stink that no Company can tolerate…”, which sounds like he took one of his other sayings, “Fish and visitors stink in three days” and changed it for the purposes of this essay.

He then closes with this gem:

And I cannot but conclude, that in Comparison therewith, for universal and continual utility, the Science of the Philosophers above-mentioned, even with the Addition, Gentlemen, of your “Figure quelconque” and the Figures inscrib’d in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a FART-HING.

Mind you, he was 75 when he wrote this.

He delivered the essay in 1783 to a British philosopher, and Franklin suggested it he should forward it to chemist Joseph Priestley, who worked in the field of… gases.

Since then, the essay has gone down as an incredibly hilarious thing to read, because of Franklin’s handling of the subject and the pun at the end. 240 years after he wrote it, members of an actual Belgian academy wrote a response letter to Franklin.

Thus ends the tale of the Letter to a Royal Academy. Franklin was not only right in that we should fix flatulence, but that, stacked against other studies, it is rarely worth a fart-hing!