He had read the meaning of
the puffing of the young steam engine of James Watt and he had heard of
a marvelous series of British inventions for spinning and weaving. He
saw that his own countrymen were astir, trying to substitute the power
of steam for the strength of muscles and the fitful wind. John Fitch on
the Delaware and James Rumsey on the Potomac were already moving vessels
by steam. John Stevens of New York and Hoboken had set up a machine shop
that was to mean much to mechanical progress in America. Oliver Evans,
a mechanical genius of Delaware, was dreaming of the application
of high-pressure steam to both road and water carriages. Such
manifestations, though still very faint, were to Franklin the signs of a
new era.

And so, with vision undimmed, America's most famous citizen lived
on until near the end of the first year of George Washington's
administration. On April 17, 1790, his unconquerable spirit took its
flight.

In that year, 1790, was taken the First Census of the United States.
The new nation had a population of about four million people. It then
included practically the present territory east of the Mississippi,
except the Floridas, which belonged to Spain. But only a small part
of this territory was occupied. Much of New York and Pennsylvania was
savage wilderness. Only the seacoast of Maine was inhabited, and the
eighty-two thousand inhabitants of Georgia hugged the Savannah River.
Hardy pioneers had climbed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee,
but the Northwest Territory--comprising Ohio, Michigan, Indiana,
Illinois, and Wisconsin--was not enumerated at all, so scanty were its
people, perhaps not more than four thousand.

Though the First Census did not classify the population by occupation it
is certain that nine-tenths of the breadwinners worked more or less upon
the soil. The remaining tenth were engaged in trade, transportation,
manufacturing, fishing and included also the professional men, doctors,
lawyers, clergymen, teachers, and the like. In other words, nine out of
ten of the population were engaged primarily in the production of food,
an occupation which today engages less than three out of ten. This
comparison, however, requires some qualification. The farmer and the
farmer's wife and children performed many tasks which are now done in
factories. The successful farmer on the frontier had to be a jack of
many trades. Often he tanned leather and made shoes for his family