American Philosophical Society

The thermometer could not replace celestial navigation or the sounding lead, but it offered an additional clue when clouds hit the sky and the water remained too deep for soundings.

He published his observations in The Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, which elected him in 1787, and later refined them in his 1799 book Thermometrical Navigation.

When the revolution erupted, Williams abandoned promising London connections and joined Franklin in France in 1776.

Congress had sent Franklin, Silas Dean, and Arthur Lee to secure French money, arms, supplies, and recognition.

Philadelphia offered precisely the setting his varied interests required.

Williams conducted experiments in meteorology, mechanics, and the manufacture of sugar, while he continued to publish and refine the thermometric observations at sea described earlier.

Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1787, he later served it as secretary, counselor, and vice president.

He also entered civic life, and although he had no formal legal education and was not admitted to the bar, his commercial experience and civic standing helped secure his 1796 appointment as lay associate judge of Philadelphia's Court of Common Pleas, a position that did not require him to be a lawyer.

But plenty of people were still interested in deciphering its pages.

In April 1921, a University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor named William Romaine Newbold stood up at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society and announced he'd done it.

Newbold's claim was that each Voynich character was made up of tiny microscopic marks and those marks were shorthand containing the real message.

Using this method, he interpreted a spiral drawing on one page as Roger Bacon's own sketch of the Andromeda Nebula and concluded that Bacon had been using a telescope and a microscope centuries before either instrument existed.

ghost stories have been told for years and years and there are some famous ghosts and some famous ghost stories the ghost of anne boleyn the second wife of british king henry viii is said to haunt the tower of london as well as her childhood home 25 miles southeast of the tower in kent It's claimed that some have seen the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States.

In fact, it's said that the statue of Franklin in front of the American Philosophical Society building in Philadelphia comes to life and has been seen dancing in the street.

A young Robert E. Lee has been seen, apparently, at his childhood home in Alexandria, Virginia, and has been known to ring the doorbell and rearrange objects in the house.

People say they've heard the four-year-old Lee giggling in the hallways.

Okay.

In 1886, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, which is an intellectual society that was founded by Benjamin Franklin.

And he was knighted in 1897.

Wow.

And it's because...

The founding fathers, I mean, one of the analogs for Elon Musk is Benjamin Franklin, who invents bifocals, invents a stove, which is still in use today, invents lightning rods to save houses, creates the American Philosophical Society.

I mean, you think about Franklin as this universal character.

The founding fathers create a patent office.

So we still have all the objects here at Wick.

The papers are now at the American Philosophical Society, where they're accessible to researchers who use it to study everything from the yellow fever epidemic to early American scientific endeavors and even things like our heritage roses.

All right.

Let's hit it.

He called it fantasy.

In letters to Kloss that fall and the following spring, now in the Kloss Papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, he wrote that the abduction had not taken place, that it was a reproduction of Betty's dream, and that his real clinical interest in the case had been what he called Barney's developing racial paranoia.

He also wrote that he was certain the Hills had seen a bright light in the sky.

Martin disputes the authenticity of one of those letters, the one dated March 1, 1976.

Well, Humboldt, yeah, read Du Pont's book.

That is, uh, the milestone, uh, the beginning of American linguistics is considered to be, uh, the volume, uh, of the transactions of, uh, of the American Philosophical Society.

Um, Du Pont was secretary of, uh, the literary committee of the society, and he published a volume of the transactions, um, in which, uh, yeah, it's all about American languages.

The, the centerpiece is a, a treatise by Heckewelder.