The chair Franklin stared at all summer
September 17, 1787, Philadelphia. Thirty-nine men signed the new Constitution in a room with the windows shut, because nobody outside was allowed to hear a word of what they had spent the summer doing.
While the last of them signed, Benjamin Franklin looked at the chair George Washington had been sitting in all summer. A rising sun was painted on its back.
Franklin said painters cannot tell a rising sun from a setting one, and that he had spent the whole session unable to tell which this was. Now he knew. It was rising.
The chair is still in that room today.
(Photo: Assembly Room, Independence Hall, July 2026, Dough4872 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)
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