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Franklin first visited the European continent
in the summer of 1761, with his son William. They traveled to
a number of cities in Flanders (what we today call Belgium)
and the Netherlands and toured several Roman Catholic cathedrals.
Franklin was particularly impressed that the Flemish people
didn’t follow a strict Puritanical interpretation of the
Sabbath. Franklin seemed to like the fact that on Sundays in
Flanders many people "went to the play or the opera, where
there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing."
In the Netherlands, Franklin visited the Dutch city of Leyden. There he met
Pieter van Musschenbroek, who invented the so-called Leyden electrical jar,
which Franklin used in many of his experiments with electricity. Franklin found
the Dutch people to be very tidy and clean, but his son William was disgusted
by the way Dutch men and women smoked pipes almost incessantly.
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copyright 2002 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. All rights reserved.
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