[1] Franklin was born in Banner Elk in North Carolina, United States, on July 25, 1927.

[2] He lost his enthusiasm for the navy after President Truman's decision of atomic bombings of Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Franklin took a discharge from the navy on medical grounds and joined Georgia Institute of Technology.

Franklin's 1958 doctoral thesis “Sampled-Data Control Systems” (co-authored by Franklin's dissertation advisor, John R. Ragazzini) introduced digital control to a discipline which had previously operated almost exclusively in the analog domain.

[5] On August 9, 2012, he died at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto at the age of 85.