I live a block away from a large imposing building that says “Franklin Institute” on it. It is flanked by Appleton and Berkeley Streets and Tremont Avenue in the South End of Boston. People pass it every day and do not give it a second thought. Yet, that building and the people it serves, exists because of something that happened over 200 years ago.

　　In 1789, when Benjamin Franklin was eighty-three years old, he added a codicil to the will he had written two years before. Franklin divided most of his estate among his relatives and descendants and made bequests to various public causes. The interest on one gift was to be used to award silver medals to outstanding students each year. The first Franklin Medals were awarded in 1793, and they continue to be given to this day.

　　Franklin’s codicil of 1789 would also create a long-lived bequest, one intended to help young people, and it included a plan that covered two hundred years. The codicil cancelled a previous bequest and offered the money to the city of Philadelphia and the town of Boston. Unlike the other founding fathers, Franklin did not begin life in the colonial gentry. He was born in 1706 on Milk Street in Boston, the youngest son in a family of seventeen children. His father was a tallow chandler, and after Franklin spent two years in school, his father put him to work―first in the shop, then as an apprentice with Franklin’s brother James, a printer. Franklin went on to make a fortune as a printer and publisher.

　　Franklin detailed how the bequests were to be used. For the first hundred years, the money, totaling £1,000 for each city (about $4,500 in 1790’s dollars), was to serve as a loan fund to help young married tradesmen start their own businesses. Franklin estimated that the principal in Boston’s fund would grow during this period to £131,000, or about $582,000 in 1892 dollars. When the hundred years were up, the fund’s managers would divide the money, using three-fourths for public works in Boston and maintaining the rest as a loan fund for tradesmen. At the end of two hundred years, Franklin estimated, the Boston fund would total over £4,061,000, or about $7 million in today’s dollars. He felt that two hundred years was long enough for any man’s instructions to control a sum of money, and he directed the fund’s managers to give roughly three-fourths of the fund to Massachusetts and the remainder to Boston.

　　Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790 and the fight over his bequest started immediately, with squabbles between heirs, states, cities, fund managers, and others.

　　The onset of the Industrial Revolution brought on the decline of the traditional system in which a young man rose from apprentice to journeyman to master; many people went to work in factories. The Fund’s managers began to invest the capital in savings accounts and a life insurance company. In 1866, the Fund had total assets of over $110,000. When the Fund reached its hundredth anniversary in 1891, its value was more than $391,000. The arrival of the Fund’s hundredth anniversary meant that three-fourths of the money would now be turned over to the city of Boston for public works. The rest, about $100,000, would continue to be loaned and invested by the board until 1991, the two hundredth anniversary of Franklin’s bequest, when the proceeds would be divided between Boston and the state of Massachusetts. In 1893, after public hearings, the board of managers recommended establishing a trade school because it seemed a perfect successor to the apprenticeship system, enabling Franklin’s legacy to help young tradesmen in a way that suited the industrial age.

　　In 1904, the Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision which remains legal basis of the management of Franklin’s codicil bequest. The court stated that Franklin’s legacy to Boston was a public charity, and it had the right to appoint its own managers. Although the first part of the Fund had now grown to over $400,000, that amount would not really suffice to purchase land, construct a suitable building, and maintain an endowment for operating expenses. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born American steel magnate, made an offer they could not refuse. Franklin was one of Carnegie’s heroes, and the technical school plan fit in with his philanthropic vision, so the multimillionaire offered to provide the school with an endowment by matching the amount in the Fund. Carnegie’s gift came with two conditions: the new school was to be an industrial school, and the city of Boston was to provide the land for the building. The choice of a site was a 16,000-square-foot lot in Boston’s South End.

　　In 1908, the Franklin Union building was dedicated. Classes began with offerings in Mechanical Drawing, Industrial Chemistry, Steam Engines and Boilers, Industrial Electricity, and Mechanics, and related areas―but not printing. In 1916, a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers was held to celebrate the first national group telephone transmission, linking San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Over nine hundred people filled the Franklin Union hall to hear guest speakers from around the country via telephone, including Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson. In 1927, W. E. Harkness of the AT&T gave the first public demonstration of the telephoto process, which could transmit a five-by-seven-inch photograph anywhere over telephone wires in seven minutes.

　　By 1961, the school had a new name, the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, and was a technical college, awarding associate’s degrees in engineering. By 1971, students could choose from six associate degree programs: five in various branches of engineering technology, and one in industrial chemistry. In 1995 the College was granted the authority to award a Bachelor’s of Science degree.

　　The second hundred years terminated on June 30, 1991 with a value of $4.4 million and the codicil did not specify what was to be done with the funds once given to the Commonwealth. Michael S. Dukakis, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, appointed a commission to recommend the best use of the monies from the Benjamin Franklin Trust Fund in Executive Order 294.

　　Sadly, his successor, William Weld, revoked the Executive Order and put the money in the general fund. Philadelphia supposedly used their share to have a big party with entertainers Ben Vereen and Aretha Franklin. No one was sensitive to Franklin’s desire to support the youth of the cities that nurtured him.

　　The codicil bequest devised by Benjamin Franklin over two centuries ago affected us to this day. There is a Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, a museum and science center, and thousands of students have graduated from the Boston school. Both exist because of Benjamin Franklin, printer.