19 West Register Street, Edinburgh EH2 2AA
Step inside this Victorian pub and look up at the walls. Among the ceramic tile murals celebrating history’s great innovators is a depiction of Benjamin Franklin at a printing press. This is one of six panels acquired at Edinburgh’s International Exhibition of Science, Industry and Art in 1886.
Franklin is here in apt company: alongside Watt, Faraday, Stephenson, Caxton, and Peel. The Café Royal’s owners placed him among the leading lights of human ingenuity, honoring the scientist, inventor, diplomat, and printer Founding Father in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town.
Franklin visited Edinburgh twice, in 1759 and 1771, describing his first stay as “six weeks of the densest happiness I have ever met with.”