In 1886, Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia said, “There is no better method of teaching swimming than that suggested by Dr. Franklin.”

Yes, the kite-flying Benjamin Franklin also made a name for himself in the 18th century as a successful swimming teacher. He used an egg trick to get beginners to discover a fundamental truth: the human body is lighter than water. Franklin and his students would wade out into water about waist deep. He’d place an egg on the sandy bottom and ask the students to pick it up. The student, holding his nose with one hand, would bend forward and reach for the egg with the other. By the time his entire body was underwater, the student’s feet were off the bottom, and he was floating.

A turn-of-the-century Britannica advises that “Confidence in the floating power of the body is the first thing to be acquired.” The writer advised that all artificial aids, such as corks, air belts, cork jackets, inflated bladders, etc., should be avoided because “they raise some parts of the body too high and sink others too far below the plane of natural flotation.” With all this wisdom and much more available today, there are still reasonably good swimmers who waste energy by keeping the head and shoulders too high in the water. Watching Olympic swimmers we saw only the breast-strokers bobbing their heads up high out of the water and those doing the butterfly lifting both arms out, knowingly sacrificing speed and energy.

To make good use of natural flotation, a swimmer must be down so deep in the water that both ears will be under the surface. When both ears are under, whether swimmers are on their backs or their fronts, almost all of the body weight is borne by the water instead of the swimmers. During the brief moment when the freestyler takes a quick bite of air, only one ear is underwater.

When my daughter, Nancy Russell, and I taught swimming, we used several variations of Franklin’s egg trick to get beginning swimmers to experience their natural buoyancy. We played a game of “under the bridge.” As they went down, deep enough so both ears were under the water, their feet floated off the bottom. We also played “monkey walk” and “elephant walk” to get them moving arms and legs while submerged and floating. Sometimes we’d call, “tea party time” and take an imaginary tray of chocolate milk and graham crackers down underwater for the tea party. Then it was time to “go back and pick up the crumbs ... then go back to wax the floor.” They didn’t know the word, flotation, but they loved the tea party.

When teaching adults, we’d say, “Let the water do the work of supporting you while using your energy to move forward, backward or whatever.” We did Franklin’s egg trick using a black ice hockey puck on the white pool bottom, and they experienced how the water helped them float.

After my mother’s death, I foolishly discarded a ragged old encyclopedia that must have predated the Franklin era. There were probably no swimming pools and few swimming teachers when the book was compiled. The section on swimming began, “To teach yourself to swim, wade out until the water is the depth of your navel. Turn to face the shore and throw yourself upon the water flailing your arms and legs violently.” The next paragraph opened with, “In some cases, there will be forward motion.”

How things have changed since that was written!