So, you know, Franklin is probably the first person to found a university and then cut it completely out of its will.

He founded the Philadelphia Academy, which went on to become the University of Pennsylvania.

He had hoped it would be a working class school. He wanted practical education.

And when he came back from Paris after the Revolutionary War, you know, he discovered he'd become a real finishing school for the gentry of Philadelphia.

Oh my gosh, they were teaching Latin and Greek. You know, they weren't teaching accounting or public speaking.

I'm Chris Hill, and that's Michael Meyer, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, an author of the new book, Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet.

The favorite founders divisive death enduring afterlife and blueprint for American prosperity.

Robert Brokamp talked with Meyer about the founding fathers' mistakes and successes in estate planning.

How Franklin popularized microfinance and open source technology and the power of small anonymous donations.

So Ben Franklin was a lot of things. Founding father, politician, postmaster, author, inventor, kite flyer.

He also became relatively wealthy. So where did most of his wealth come from?

He certainly wasn't born into it. And unlike some founding fathers, he didn't marry into it.

That's right. And I thought his wealth would have come from his many inventions, but in fact, it didn't.

And Franklin today is often cited as a founder of the open source movement, because although there weren't patents while he was alive, he could have had exclusive commercial licenses on his many inventions.

But instead he said, just as I benefited from the technology of others, I want others to benefit from my technology as well.

Franklin was a bit of an inveterate borrower, as we're going to see, as we talk about his last one, testament, whose ideas largely came from somebody else.

Just like many of his famous sayings originated with someone else.

But to go back to your question, he was a very good business person.

He married well, and we'll talk about his wife, Deborah, and a little bit as well, because he did benefit from the property her parents owned when he started his printing shop.

But it was really his press from which he derived most of his money.

Not only did he benefit from, as deputy postmaster, he could enjoy free postage, so he could send poor Richard's Almanac and his Pennsylvania Gazette up and down the Eastern seaboard.

But as he retired at age 42 to devote himself to a life of philanthropy, as he called it, in science, he also started franchising printing shops up and down the seaboard as well.

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