The Franklin Institute

The Franklin Institute is a science museum and memorial housed within a massive Classical Revival building that stretches along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Founded in eighteen twenty-four by Samuel Vaughan Merrick and William Hypolitus Keating, it began as an organization dedicated to the mechanic arts and the promotion of American scientific inquiry. The current structure, which opened in nineteen thirty-four, was funded by a public campaign that raised over five million dollars in less than two weeks during the early years of the Great Depression.