26 Fascinating Founding Fathers Facts - mental_floss - List Show (242)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube

And did you know that before Ben Franklin was on money, he printed money

He started his career as a printer and went on to own a press that made all the money for colonial Delaware and Pennsylvania

He also had a strange method for deterring counterfeiters. He spelled Pennsylvania incorrectly on all of his money

That way, when counterfeiters copied the bills, they thought they were working from a fake version and would correct the spelling, and then Franklin could catch them

Those are just two of the many amazing facts about the American founding fathers that I'm going to share with you today in this video presented by our friends at History

So everyone knows about Paul Revere's famous ride, but did you know that it included a monumental DUI

In order to get to Lexington to warn of the impending British invasion, Revere had to travel

through Medford, the rum capital of America. He stopped long enough to get suitably drunk, and then the stealthy ride that Revere had

intended turned into a loud and drunken rampage. In fact, he was so rowdy that patrolling redcoats detained him for an hour before letting him go

Of course, by then, he had made enough of a racket to let everyone know that trouble was brewing

And speaking of brewing, one of the men Revere was on a mission to find and alert with Samuel

Adams, who worked in his father's malt house as a maltster. His name is now synonymous with the beer, of course, but that's not really Sam Adams

face on the label. Poor Samuel wasn't known for his good looks, so a rumor spread that the Boston brewery used

handsomer Paul Revere's portrait for their logo. But technically it is a picture of Sam Adams just a very very flattering one like multiple Instagram filters The other person Revere was trying to track down during his drunken ride was John Hancock best known for his you know John Hancock his huge and ornate signature

But his signature on the Declaration of Independence was actually kept secret for months after

the signing because all of the signatures were out of fear for the signer's safety

Hancock's successor as the president of the Continental Congress was South Carolina's

Henry Laurens, a man who serves as an example of why the term Founding Fathers shouldn't

be synonymous with great people. For one thing, Laurens got rich and powerful because he was a partner in North America's

largest slave trading house. After Laurens, John Jay became president of the Continental Congress, and he was a strong

opponent of slavery. He actually introduced legislation to abolish slavery in New York as early as 1777

Jay was in fact so popular that he was nominated and elected into office twice without his knowledge

The first time was in 1784 when he returned from Europe after negotiating the Treaty of Paris and upon coming home, found that Congress had named him Secretary of Foreign Affairs, a job that he would come to hate

Later, while Jay was serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1794, President George Washington sent him to London to negotiate yet another peace treaty

And when Jay came back from that trip, he found that he had been elected Governor of New York. Surprise

Speaking of surprises, you may be shocked to hear that Ben Franklin was an expert swimmer

Is there anything he wasn't good at? As a child, he loved swimming in Philadelphia's Skoolkill River, and went on to consider opening

schools for young runners and swimmers before going on to do, you know, essentially everything else

And to be a proper polemeth, you must, of course, sleep very little. Franklin reportedly awoke at 5 in the morning every day and didn go to bed until 1am That said Ben Franklin was a big fan of convenience and even laziness Like for instance he invented a mechanical arm to retrieve shelved books

and a system where he could unlock his door from bed by activating a pulley

Moving on to another Benjamin, Benjamin Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence

and he was also a physician, today known as the first doctor to believe that mental illness was a disease

and not something to be blamed on demons. As the so-called father of American psychiatry, Dr. Rush paved the way for the humane treatment of the mentally ill

but not all of his treatments would be considered humane by today's standard

For instance, he was a strong believer in blood purging, although back then, who wasn't

And he also strapped some of his patients to spinning boards to force their blood to flow outwards

He also invented the tranquilizing chair, a device that seems like it would be the opposite of tranquilizing

To achieve tranquilization, the patient would be strapped into a seat and immobilized before having a box placed on their head to deprive their senses

Boy, would I rather vacation on the beach or in the tranquilizing box? I can't decide

Anyway, Rush was friends with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and knew them well during their famous and heated feuds

One night, the doctor had a dream about his friends, in which they reconciled their differences

He wrote Adams and Jefferson to tell them all about it, and his dream became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the two statesmen reached out to talk to each other

Then they wound up renewing their friendship, and then they died on the same day. It's very cute

Not only was it the same day, Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4th, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence

Adams and Jefferson were also linked by their shared love of pets Jefferson had two pet grizzly bear cubs and Adams had a dog named Satan Now Satan a weird name for a dog but George Washington might take the cake when it comes to our founding fathers pet naming skills Three of our first president dogs were named

Drunkard, Mopsy, and Sweetlips. Alright, I hear by christen you Mopsy, you're Sweetlips, Elephant, you're Drunkard

I will remind you, these are the dudes that we are still looking up to 230 years later

We're still like, but what would the owner of Sweetlips say about this

Ben Franklin's fellow founding fathers didn't want him to draft the Declaration of Independence

because they were worried he might try to sneak a joke into it. They clearly were familiar with his work, like the time that he wrote the Royal Academy

asking them to find a way to make his farts stop smelling. Franklin liked that letter enough to sign it under his own name, but he wrote many essays

books, and more under a whole slew of pseudonyms. They included Richard Saunders, Silence Duguid, Anthony Afterwit, Polly Baker, Alice Adder-Tungue

Busybody, Benevolist, Cecilia Shortface, and Martha Careful. The last two were used by Franklin to make fun of Samuel Keemer, his former employer whom he accused of stealing his ideas

Ben Franklin was many things. Brilliant, ambitious, incredibly hardworking, astonishingly petty. But he also coined many of the electricity-related terms we use today, including battery, conductor, and electrician

And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that Ben Franklin was also prolific when it came to alcohol

In 1737, Franklin published a list of over 200 synonyms for getting drunk