Big birthday bash to fete Franklin

"I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence." — Benjamin Franklin, 1783

PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia is making plans to honor an 18th-century overachiever — Benjamin Franklin — with a 21st-century party.

Five years in the making, the tricentennial celebration of Franklin's birth will mostly unfold during 2006, but a few events are already under way. Its centerpiece will be a multimillion-dollar touring exhibition, "Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World," opening at the National Constitution Center here on Dec. 15 of this year. The show will remain in Philadelphia until April 30, 2006, and then head to St. Louis, Houston, Denver and Atlanta, before wrapping up in Paris in early 2008.

Included are more than 250 artifacts, from Franklin's chess set to a lightning rod, some never before on public display and gathered from descendants of Franklin and institutions throughout the United States and Europe.

"We're introducing the many faces of Franklin into the 21st century," said historian Rosalind Remer, executive director of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, a federally commissioned consortium organizing the events. The consortium is composed of five Philadelphia institutions that Franklin helped create or that have other ties.

This year's events include the Franklin Institute Science Museum's permanent exhibit, "Franklin . . . He's Electric!"; the Please Touch Museum's "Celebrate Stories: Franklin as Postmaster," a May program in which children can decorate stamps and write letters with ink quills; and a "Science in the Summer" program at public libraries throughout June featuring experiments with magnets and electricity.

The events all highlight Franklin's astonishing resume — printer, author, publisher, statesman, environmentalist, inventor, scientist, civil servant, bookseller, progressive thinker and Founding Father.

A list of his civic-minded accomplishments and inventions seems remarkably contemporary. He worried about public health and safety, organizing the Pennsylvania Hospital and Philadelphia's first firefighting company. He invented bifocals, swim fins and a heat-efficient stove — the Franklin stove.

And many of the sayings originally printed in his annual publication, "Poor Richard's Almanack," remain well-known and sound as cleverly worded as the tagline for a modern TV commercial — phrases like "A penny saved is a penny earned," "Fish and visitors stink after three days," and "Haste makes waste."