I’ve been excited to write about this person for a while, and then I get through reading my dozenth article to fact check and it’s unclear how much of the story I expected was ever true.
But legends are important, so let’s breathe life into this one.
Today’s Moment of Science… the clockmaker, the astronomer, and the ultimately sad end of Benjamin Banneker.
It starts with a bucket of milk tipping over in England in the 1600s. Maybe.
An English dairymaid named Molly Walsh was sentenced to seven years as an indentured servant in the colonies for theft. After she was freed, she set up a farm and then bought some slaves because somehow the experience of being owned didn’t teach her shit. Then she freed her slaves and married one of them, Bannka, having four children with him, and one of her grandchildren was Benjamin Banneker.
Because of a lack of documentation around this time, it’s possible every word of that was wrong. Which will be a theme today.
Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9th, 1731. His education ended when he was strong enough to work the farm. Even having the relative privilege of being born into a family of free Black land-owners, this was still the 1700s. Education and options were limited. But he’d been taught to read at a young age, and he read everything he could get his hands on. Peter Heinrich, a Quaker friend and firm abolitionist, shared his personal library with Banneker, helping the autodidact on his way.
At fifteen with just an eighth grade education, he created an irrigation system for the family’s farm. Because they needed one, and so he just figured that out. As you do.
When he was 21, he was given a pocket watch. Instead of using it to tell time, he used it to learn how to make clocks. He carved a clock entirely out of wood that was so precise that it struck perfectly on the hour for decades. It was rumored to work until his death, but that was unable to be confirmed as the house burned down the day of his funeral (which is, uh, not at all suspicious), taking the clock with it.
Being the 1700s, fancy working clocks weren’t all that common. He may as well have told people he invented live nude girls. People came to his home just to look at the clock.
This gained his brilliant mind a reputation, and local tinkerer Joseph Ellicott hired him to design fancier clocks with him. He lent Banneker books and scientific instruments to study astronomy. He would become friends and do business with the Ellicott family for the rest of his life. He also worked with them on some of the early surveying work on Washington, DC.
Since clock making, surveying, and figuring out how to manage large scale agriculture all seemed like cake for this guy with an eighth grade education, successfully predicting a solar eclipse in 1789 was just icing. He began predicting weather and agricultural patterns, publishing them in his almanack for seven years. He exchanged a few letters with President Thomas Jefferson that were published in the 1793 almanack. Banneker gave him an eloquent plea for justice and abolition. Jefferson gave him lip service.
Here’s where things take a turn.
A lot of things I expected were true from reading popular accounts about Banneker over the years couldn’t be verified. There’s a story that he “saved” a year’s worth of destroyed surveying plans in two days from memory, and this seems to be just that: a story. It also seems that his involvement in the surveying of DC has been embellished over the years, and documentation suggests it was minimal. The notion that his wooden clock was “the first clock” made in America is perhaps inaccurate, as there were other clockmakers in the colonies at the time. It’s possible it was the first wooden clock, perhaps an extremely accurate one, or even the first clock made with all materials native to the continent, but there were certainly clocks being made here by then.
Then I ask myself “how many things didn’t he get credit for because he was Black?” I wonder about that a lot.
Even with all the fuzzy details, he lived an incredible life that came to an equally sad end.
After his last almanack was published in 1797, he lived for less than a decade. He sold most of his farm away to the Ellicotts. He’d suffered with chronic alcoholism for most of his life, worsening in old age. He was 74 when he died in his log cabin on October 9th, 1806.
This has been your daily Moment of Science asking you to remember this goddamn legend.
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