Explaining Gadgets to Ben Franklin Does Not Compute

I have a recurrent fantasy that I am visited in my kitchen one morning by Benjamin Franklin, miraculously reincarnated after 200 years.

Not only am I excited by this encounter with the wisest of our founders, but I’m intimidated by the task of explaining our electric gadgets to him.

Franklin was among the first to experiment with electricity; everyone knows how he flew a kite with a key attached to its line to prove that lightning and electricity are the same.

Surely Franklin will have foreseen electricity’s practical applications, I realize; in the mid-18th Century he was killing turkeys with electricity and noting that birds killed in this way “eat uncommonly tender.” But how can he possibly grasp the technology of television?

How can I, with no understanding of it myself, possibly explain it to him? Assuming that he has enjoyed some divine favor to be reincarnated, why has he chosen to turn up in my kitchen? Imagine what joy his sudden appearance would give an articulate Caltech scientist like Al Hibbs.

I decide to start with the electric light. Since he knows that electricity gives light, the light globe should not be too hard for him to understand.

Then the toaster. He knows, of course, that electricity gives heat, so the toaster shouldn’t give him any trouble.

Then the kitchen phone rings. Explaining the telephone will take some doing and will be quite beyond my capabilities. The thing wasn’t even invented until almost a century after his death. The idea that one can touch a few buttons and instantly ring a phone in any one of millions of other houses might stun him, at least momentarily.

I will probably skip the microwave, since I haven’t the slightest idea how it works. All I know is that it will never replace the open spit. If he insists, my wife can show him how she cooks a microwave dinner; but if he tastes it, I suspect he’d rather have electrically killed turkey.

I will try to keep him from wandering into my workroom, where he would discover my computer. If I tried to explain how it works, he would have to conclude that the computer is smarter than I am.

I doubt that I could ever explain to him that the computer is linked to the telephone in such a way that I can type a document into the computer and send it over the telephone to a distant place where another computer receives and duplicates it verbatim. I don’t even want to think about how that happens.

I can’t hide the television from him forever. Sooner or later he will see the screen.

“What’s that?” he says.

“Oh, that,” I say. “That’s the, uh, television screen.”

“Television?” he says, pronouncing the word as if it were an everyday phenomenon.

“It’s just radio with pictures,” I say, forgetting that I haven’t explained radio yet. I plunge into it, knowing that two sentences will take me into the thicket of my ignorance.

“You turn it on,” I say, “and it shows pictures of things that are happening in distant places.” So far so good. “Live,” I add.

I suspect I have already gone as far as I can go. “Here, I’ll show you,” I say. The channel I happen to have tuned in is showing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

Franklin is astounded. “Is that . . . are we . . . ?” he stumbles.

I realize that he thinks the human species has evolved into teen-age mutant Ninja turtles. But of course he wouldn’t know about evolution. “That’s not live,” I say. “That’s just a fantasy,” I explain, as if everything he is seeing isn’t a fantasy.

Later he is even more astounded when I switch to ESPN and the auto races. I realize he has never seen a car. We see a beer ad. I’m sure he has never seen shapely young women in bikinis.

After all, it occurs to me, the guy is 84 years old. Unless the reincarnated are immune to a second death, he may expire of shock.

“Women go around like that?” he asks.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” I answer, doubting that he’s ever heard that expression before.

I can’t wait to let him see a sex and violence movie, in which semi-nude men and women simulate coitus, old English expletives are freely spouted and 40 cars are consumed in fiery crashes. We’ve come a long way since the bundling board.

I show him the doorbell. It’s the only thing in the house I understand. “You press this button,” I explain, “electricity goes through a wire and rings a bell in the kitchen.”

He nods. “Elementary,” he says. “Can we see another beer ad?”