It was discovered on 9 September 1934, by Dutch astronomer Hendrik van Gent at the Leiden Southern Station, annex to the Johannesburg Observatory in South Africa.

[2] Franklin-Adams is a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.

[1] This minor planet named after British amateur astronomer John Franklin Adams (1843–1912), who created one of the earliest detailed, photographic atlases of the complete night sky (the Franklin-Adams plates or charts).

[8] In 2016, an international study modeled a lightcurve with a concurring period of 2.978301 hours and found a spin axis of (277.0°, 57.0°) and (66.0°, 48.0°) in ecliptic coordinates (λ, β) (U=n.a.).

[14] According to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, Franklin-Adams measures 8.864 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an unusually high albedo of 0.356,[6] while the Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes a standard albedo for stony asteroids of 0.20 and calculates a diameter of 11.30 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 12.1.