The Benjamin Franklin Room was used as the Repository or Model Room until the mid-19th century. It was used to exhibit the Society’s collection of art, textiles, and machines – originals as well as models.

The four Doric columns now in the room replaced the Adam originals in 1922. The columns are structural, as well as decorative, supporting the floor of the Great Room above. The marble chimneypieces, originally in the Great Room, were also moved to this room in 1922. Thereafter and until 1971, the room was converted into the library and reading room.

It was renamed the Benjamin Franklin Room in 1967. After 1971, it became the meeting place for our committees and was used again as an exhibition room. In December 2011, as part of a major refurbishment of RSA House by Matthew Lloyd Architects, London specialist designers Troika were commissioned to produce a unique chandelier for the room, inspired by Franklin’s invention of the bifocal lens.

Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath, politician, inventor, and natural philosopher who was invited by our founder, William Shipley, to become a corresponding member in 1756. He was a printer, scientist, and US Founding Father, as well as the inventor of bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove.

Benjamin Franklin and the RSA

Franklin did not only agree to become a member of the Society but that year paid the twenty guineas to become a full member for life. Franklin moved to London in 1757 and was heavily involved with the Society and its committees on agriculture, chemistry, manufactures, mechanics, polite arts, and particularly colonies and trade, which he occasionally chaired. At these committees, he discussed the awarding of prizes (members used to pool their subscription funds, to be spent on initiatives for the public good in the form of honorary medals or cash prizes to encourage inventions, discoveries, and design skills), including those for hand mills, county maps, rat traps, silk, tea, botanic gardens, persimmon gum, logwood dye, myrtle wax, American sturgeon, hemp, opium, tide mills, train oil, isinglass, wool manufacture, pumps, compass improvements, nutmeg, potash, ship-building, carrots, maize, planting Scotch firs, water purifications, and drawings.

Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner when he joined the Society in 1756. By the time he returned to America, however, he had become vocal in his opposition to both the slave trade and to the institution of slavery itself.

In the late 1760s, Franklin’s attendance at the Society declined, and by 1775 he appears to have stopped attending meetings entirely. Franklin returned to Philadelphia and on 4 July 1776 was a signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence.

The Benjamin Franklin Medal was established in 1956 to honour the 250th anniversary of Franklin’s birth and the 200th anniversary of his membership. Awarded annually, a list of its recipients can be seen on the walls of the main stairwell outside the Great Room.