Podcasts about poor richard's almanac

Piece based on Benjamin Franklin painting by Rosie Julin. "I was inspired by Ben Franklin's breadth and depth of pursuits. He was truly a man ahead of his time. The piece first reflects on the effects of his contributions to our modern scientific discoveries, democracy, and press while maintaining a feel for the archival. The piece then transitions to his writings and reflections on his own life. He had the quintessentially American story of "pulling himself up by his bootstraps".  "The portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis was painted while he was Ambassador to France, towards the end of his life, and while he was working on his famous Autobiography. I also included some of his works from his Poor Richard's Almanac, one of his first claims to fame. Finally, the piece concludes with a line from his Autobiography where he explains that reflections are made durable by putting them in writing. And he did just that. Through his letters and writings, we are able to learn quite a bit about this man of the Enlightenment. The Baroque Trap music is created by the artist Bacalao (http://bacalao.ch/biography-en.html)." Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian

One of the most common misquotes attributed to Benjamin Franklin is “A penny saved is a penny earned.” It’s close, but it’s not Franklin. Franklin is best known as one of the foremost founders of a new nation. He helped define the American spirit through his wit and wisdom. Nationally recognized scholar on his business practices, Dr. Blaine McCormick, says Franklin is often misquoted.

Transcript: By the late 16th Century, the Julian calendar was out of sync with the seasons. With an average length of 365.25 days, it is in fact a hundredth of a day longer than a true solar year.  After centuries, these hundredths of a day had added up to days, and the solar calendar was in fact ten days off.  Pope Gregory, representing the Catholic Church, instituted a calendar reform, adding essentially one rule to the Julian calendar: that you would skip the leap year in century years unless divisible by 400. With this extra rule the calendar will now very closely approximate the Solar year, and this calendar will be good enough for us to use for thousands of years to come.  Non-Catholic countries, the Protestant countries of England and America in particular, did not adopt the Catholic calendar for another hundred years, by which time their calendars were eleven days off.  Essentially, in one swoop, the governments of the United States and Britain lost eleven days going directly one year from April eleventh to April first.  Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanac to reassure people about the loss of the eleven days.  The French, a Catholic country, decided to mock the Americans by creating April Fool's Day to mark the day that the British and the Americans finally adopted the Gregorian calendar.  Have calendars never been sensible or rational?  At the time of the French Revolution, for twelve years the French instituted a decimal calendar with twelve thirty-day months, not named after Pagan gods, five festival days, a leap year, a week divided into ten days, the day into ten hours, each hour into a hundred minutes and each minute a hundred seconds, the world's only decimal calendar.  But because no other culture would follow this calendar, it was dropped by Napoleon after only 12 years.

Before he became a patriot and founding father, Benjamin Franklin was a businessman. In this audio series "This Month in the Life of Benjamin Franklin," Dr. Blaine McCormick takes a closer look at Benjamin Franklin's business years offering insight and motivation for today's business leaders. In this segment for late December, McCormick discusses the launch of Poor Richard's Almanac and the entrepreneurial flair and promotional genius Franklin used to ensure its success.