by A Philadelphia scholar of colonial literature reads about the delayed flying Tesla Roadster and asks what Poor Richard would say about paying for a car with no price
Monday, 19 October 2026. Philadelphia. A bench near Franklin Court on Market Street, the outline of Franklin’s house traced in steel above me, a hot pretzel, 12.20pm.
The City Of The Original Tech Founder
Philadelphia is Benjamin Franklin’s city, and we never let anybody forget it. His face is on everything. His name is on bridges, institutes, parkways and at least four bars. Every tourist wants a photo with a man in a tricorn hat pretending to be him. Every undergraduate in my colonial literature class arrives believing he discovered electricity with a kite and a key. He did not discover it. He demonstrated, more or less, that lightning is electrical, and then he used that knowledge to invent the lightning rod, which actually saved buildings. That is the difference between a stunt and a product.
I was thinking about this as I sat in Franklin Court and read the London Prat report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years late. The car lifts itself over a row of other Teslas on compressed air thrusters, drives upside down and reaches sixty in about a second. Production is targeted for 2028. Customers have paid deposits for a car without a price.
What Would Poor Richard Say
Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack every year for a quarter of a century, starting in 1732, and filled it with proverbs about thrift, industry and not making a fool of yourself. Lost time is never found again. A penny saved is twopence clear. Many of these sayings he borrowed, polished or coined himself. They were, in their way, the eighteenth century’s version of a motivational social media account, except they also included the tide tables.
Poor Richard would have had views about the Roadster reservation system. A man who pays fifty thousand dollars for the chance to learn how much more he will be asked to pay is the exact man Poor Richard spent twenty-five years warning against. I can hear the proverb now, in Franklin’s dry Philadelphia voice: he that buys what he cannot see, shall wait for what he cannot have.
A Stunt Versus A Rod
The report’s best observation is that the car can escape gravity but not Tesla’s production schedule. Gravity was beaten. A Gantt chart, no. Franklin would have understood this perfectly. His kite experiment, in 1752, was a spectacular demonstration. But the thing that mattered was what came next: a cheap iron rod, fixed to a roof, that quietly led lightning into the ground and stopped houses burning down. He did not patent it. He gave it away. He wrote it up in the almanac so that any farmer could make one.
The Roadster, so far, is the kite. It is spectacular. It flies. It makes people gasp. What the world is still waiting for is the rod: the useful, cheap, unglamorous thing that changes how ordinary people live. Franklin knew that the stunt gets the crowd, but the rod gets the history books.
There is a longer note on how I came to Franklin, and to the eighteenth century generally, on my about page, which explains how a girl from Wilmington, Delaware ended up spending her life arguing with dead pamphleteers. The short version is that a high school teacher handed me the Autobiography and said, here is a man who sold himself brilliantly. I have been reading him suspiciously ever since.
Franklin Was Also Late, Occasionally
In fairness to Tesla, Franklin himself was not immune to delay. He spent years in London and Paris on diplomatic missions, often waiting for answers that never came, and the colonies often waited on him in turn. Diplomacy in the eighteenth century moved at the speed of a sailing ship. A letter across the Atlantic took weeks. A reply took weeks more. The Roadster’s nine years would have seemed, to an eighteenth-century diplomat, almost brisk. Franklin spent nearly two decades on and off in Europe. He did, eventually, come home with a treaty. The Roadster has not yet come home with a price.
American Politics And The Flying Car
The report imagines the regulators, the FAA and the highway safety agency, eventually getting round to the question of whether a flying car counts as an aircraft or an automobile. As someone who follows American politics with a historian’s weariness, I would add that no federal agency is going to get round to anything quickly in the current climate. Several of them, as far as I can tell, are themselves in transit.
My partner Marcus, who teaches high school civics, said his students asked him last week which government department is responsible for flying cars. He said, honestly, that he did not know, and that it would probably be decided in court after the first one landed on somebody’s porch. One student said that was the most American answer he had ever heard. Marcus gave him extra credit.
Back To Class
My afternoon seminar is on Franklin’s autobiography, in which he describes, with unbearable self-satisfaction, his project for arriving at moral perfection by tracking thirteen virtues in a little book. He failed, and admitted it, and said the attempt had made him a better man anyway. I will ask my students whether the Roadster might be the same: a failed project for arriving at automotive perfection that will make its owners better people. They will say no. They will be right. Poor Richard would have said it more briefly.
