April 17 · This Day in America
In a bedroom on Market Street, the most useful American of his century stops working. Benjamin Franklin — printer, postmaster, scientist, diplomat, the only man to sign the Declaration, the treaty with France, the peace with Britain, and the Constitution — dies on the night of April 17, 1790, at eighty-four. He had pulled lightning out of the sky with a kite and a key, and pulled France into an alliance that won a revolution. Four days later, some twenty thousand people walk behind his coffin to Christ Church burying ground. The whole city of Philadelphia was barely larger than that crowd. Far away, the National Assembly of France goes into mourning for three days. He had asked, decades earlier, that his epitaph call him a book whose contents would one day appear once more in a new and better edition. Philadelphia simply called him theirs.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1964
On April 17, 1964, Ford unveils the Mustang at the New York World's Fair, and the same day it appears in showrooms across the country at about $2,368. It is long-hooded, short-decked, and just affordable enough to be a dream a young person could actually reach. Buyers move nearly 22,000 of them in a single day. Lee Iacocca becomes the father of an American verb: to want one.
Source: corporate.ford.com
“A Bird in the Hand is worth two in the Bush.”Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734