Benjamin Franklin is portrayed in American history as the quintessential self-made man. In "Self-reliance", Emerson asks, "Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin...?" In fact, Franklin took instruction widely, and his scientific work was highly collaborative. Friends in England sent equipment needed for his electrical experiments, others, in Philadelphia, helped him set up his workshop there. Philip Syng constructed a device for generating electrical charges, while Tomas Hopkinson demonstrated the potential of pointed conductors. Franklin, in addition to being the group's theoretician, wrote and published its results. His fame as an individual researcher is partly a consequence of the shorthand by which when one person writes about a group's discoveries, history sometimes grants singular credit for collective effort.