[3] Joseph Franklin was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1906 but his family moved to Texas early in his life.

Franklin took a position at Humble Oil in Baytown, Texas in 1934 where he established a mass spectrometry research group.

He recruited Frank Field to Humble Oil in 1952 and they co-wrote Electron Impact Phenomena and the Properties of Gaseous Ions in 1957.

[4] Franklin took a two-year leave 1957–1958 at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. before returning to Humble.

[1] In 1983, the Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry was established in his honor by the American Chemical Society.