Late in his own life and well after Franklin’s death, Benjamin West, while serving as President of the British Academy of Art, painted his old friend Benjamin Franklin in this heroic posture. Franklin’s discoveries concerning the use of electricity allowed his friend Benjamin West to give Franklin the heroic cast of a visionary Prometheus harnessing the ‘fire’ of electricity for the coming age of the yet undiscovered telegraph and the light bulb. By representing Franklin as a (literal) conductor and (figurative) mediator between the heaven and the earth, West captures something crucial about his career. Franklin was a habitual mediator between opposites: ardent believers and Enlightenment skeptics, Whigs and Tories, Americans and the English, colony and empire. By working steadily to improve the American postal system during the decades, while he served as Surveyor of the Post and then Deputy Post-master General for the British Post in American, Franklin’s efforts were incremental and pragmatic rather than Promethean. However, while this image may appear to be an odd representation of a man who was proud of his public modesty and reticence, the painting does grasp what was visionary about the how Franklin’s development of the axial media of his own epoch: the newspaper linked to a public post. His focus on media work as the infrastructure of enlightenment anticipated the transformative media of the next two centuries.