Benjamin Franklin | American Philosophical Society membership certificate for a French colleague of Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

Engraved broadside document signed (“BFranklin,” with paraph) as President of the American Philosophical Society, on laid paper (236 x 357 mm), Philadelphia, 20 January 1786, being Charles C.-J. Le Roux’s certificate of membership in the American Philosophical Society, accomplished in a clerical hand, countersigned by Society Vice Presidents John Ewing, William White, and Samuel Vaughan and by Society Secretaries James Hutchinson, John Foulke, Robert Patterson, and Samuel Magaw, embossed paper seal of the Society suspended from the certificate by original blue silk ribbon; some separations and repair at folds and left platemark. Some light marginal stains. Tipped to a mat board.

The membership certificate for Charles C.-J. Le Roux, an educator, inventor, and physicist—and a relatively early French member of the American Philosophical Society:

“To all Persons to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting. The American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for promoting useful Knowledge, desirous of advancing the Interest of the Society by associating to themselves Men of distinguished Eminence, and of conferring Marks of their Esteem upon Persons of literary Merit have Elected Monsieur Le Roux a Member of the said Philosophical Society, hereby granting unto him all the Rights of Fellowship, with all the Liberties and Privileges thereunto belonging.”

The American Philosophical Society was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, but the scholarly society soon lapsed into drowsy inactivity. It was revived in 1767 and two years later merged with the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge. Le Roux met Franklin during the latter’s ambassadorship to Paris, and while both were inventors, probably their strongest shared bond was education reform. Le Roux was the founding editor of Journal d’éducation, which he published from 1768 to 1769, reviving the title from 1776 to 1778. He advocated for a pragmatic pedagogy that deemphasized the study of classical languages; this point of view aligned almost exactly with the curriculum Franklin outlined in his Idea of the English School (see lot 55). Le Roux was elected to membership in the APS in 1775; however, the Society did not adopt a membership certificate until 1786, when all living members were entitled to receive one. The present certificate, therefore, is part of the very first issuance.

Le Roux spent his entire career in education, rising from a schoolteacher in Amiens to Physicien en l’Université de Paris. He evidently observed M. Le Coeur’s private boarding school in Passy when Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was a student there. Franklin was invited by the Société Royale de Médecine to observe a demonstration of various swimming experiments and apparatus, including early version of a wetsuit, by Le Roux held at the Bains Chinois on Île Saint-Louis in the Seine on 10 March 1783. Although Franklin was a major advocate of the benefits of swimming, it is not known if Franklin attended Le Roux’s presentation. Franklin’s very first invention, at age 11, was a pair of swimfins for the hands, and he included among the “Letters and Papers on Philosophical Subjects” appended to the 1769 edition of Experiments and Observations on Electricity (see lot 105) a letter to Oliver Neave, encouraging him to learn how to swim and extolling the “enjoyment in so delightful and wholesome an exercise.”