In 1749, Ben Franklin did a census of Philadelphia, and began collecting population figures for Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. He found that the colonial population was doubling every 25 years. He predicted that colonial North America would have more Englishman than Britain in 100 years. Malthus based his ideas on Franklin's North American calculations. Charles Darwin's grandfathers both knew Franklin well and Darwin had underlined the Franklin passages in his copy of Malthus' book. Franklin predictions were incredibly accurate. Full population figures for the United States were collected in 1790, the year of Franklin's death. In 1890, a hundred years later, it was found that the population had increased sixteenfold. Franklin had been off by less than 1/7 of a percent. In 1855, exactly 100 years after Franklin published his prediction that North American colonists would outnumber Britons in a century, the US population surpassed Britain for the first time. --- Source: [[How to Hide an Empire]]