In the early hours of an ordinary spring day in London, England, 1768, a portly man, aged 62, lifts the window sash in his first floor rooms, feeling the cool bracing chill pour through the open window, enveloping his naked body.

The man sighs contentedly, settles into his chair and begins his day as he now does on a routine basis.

I will take occasion to mention a practice I have accustomed myself, the man once explained in a letter to a friend.

The cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic, but I have found it much more agreeable to bathe in another element. I mean cold air. I rise every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever. This practice

is not painful in the least, but to the contrary, agreeable. And if I return to my bed afterwards

before I dress myself, I make a supplement to my night's

rest of one or two hours of the most pleasant sleep imaginable.

The man was Benjamin Franklin, and his nude air baths were one of the many innovations and inventions

with which he occupied himself.

During the 16 years he lived at 36 Craven Street, a five-story Georgian structure built in 1730, the only residence of Franklin's, which still stands today. Hey everybody. It's Don Wilden. Welcome to American History.

It's hard to believe that a man like Benjamin Franklin could exist outside the pages of a work of fiction,

much less that his accomplishments and thinking would still be so much a part of regular American life 300 years on.

But the sweep and span of this founding father's

biography is true and embodied today in some of the major

institutions of American life, the post office and public library being just two on a list as long as your arm.

Franklin was a polymath genius of science, letters, civics, philosophy, and everything a human being can polymath about.

His life was a flower rooted in the fertile soil of a new nation, one that fostered a freedom

of thought which usefully applied, made for the remarkable and accomplished careers of individuals

exemplified by Franklin who set out to build a pragmatic and moral society that could flourish.

America could likely not have happened without Ben Franklin, but neither could Ben Franklin have

happened without America.

But like so many American colonists, certainly prior to 76, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal Englishman, indeed spending years

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