The Society for Useful Knowledge (22 page)

The American colonies experienced an upsurge in popular interest in astronomy, and in science in general. The flawed 1761 expeditions had been widely discussed in the press. Newspapers, magazines, and serial publications such as the almanacs produced by Franklin and his competitors continued to carry accounts of new scientific developments, challenges, and theories. Eager anticipation of the next transit ensured the mobilization of a number of organized and well-equipped observation teams, backed by educational institutions, scientific circles, or wealthy benefactors and spread out at different vantage points along the Eastern Seaboard.
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Much of this renewed American activity centered on the slowly expanding legions of the learned and the curious in Philadelphia. By 1768, almost all of the original members of the Leather Apron Club, or Junto, were dead, and their leader Franklin was back in England, on a second semiofficial diplomatic tour. But new groups and movements had begun to displace the Junto and the Library Company. Among the most successful of these associations was the so-called Young Junto, which modeled itself directly after Franklin's secret club and included the sons of three of the latter institution's original members.
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Like the society that inspired it, the Young Junto was composed primarily of Quakers, or those who generally shared the Friends' sensibilities toward knowledge, civic duty, and self-improvement. Most, too, were craftsmen—a hatter, an instrument maker, an ironmonger, among them—or directly connected to the small world of colonial science, such as the two sons of botanist John Bartram. The club's initial formation followed many of the precepts first laid down by Franklin, including that of secrecy to protect the interests of its membership.
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The activities of this Young Junto, however, were intermittent and lapsed altogether by 1762, before a rebirth several years later prompted by increasing, organized resistance among Americans angered at British management of colonial affairs. Charles Thomson, a vociferous champion of colonial rights who inspired the revival of the Young Junto, was adamant that useful knowledge in the fields of agriculture and manufactures could help protect Americans from the economic depredations of their colonial masters back in England.
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In the autumn of 1767, Thomson called for a systematic examination of America's resources and prospects for growth, which he noted were “likely to be opposed by increasing Obstacles from abroad.”
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Six months later, he proposed that the Young Junto shed its secrecy and mobilize the colonial forces of useful knowledge in order to resist British pressure. “In this Country, almost every man is fond of reading and seems to have a thirst for knowledge.… Nothing seems wanting but a public Society to encourage and direct Enquiries and experiments … and to unite the labors of many to attain one grand End, namely the Advancement of useful Knowledge and the Improvement of our Country.”
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Under Thomson's leadership the Young Junto went public with its program and ideals, and significantly expanded its membership, both in the colonies and abroad. It also renamed itself the American Society held at Philadelphia
for Promoting Useful Knowledge, and proclaimed the value of such knowledge in no uncertain terms. “Knowledge is of little use when confined to mere Speculation,” read the group's manifesto, published in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
of March 7, 1768. “But when speculative Truths are reduced to Practice, when Theories, grounded upon experiments, are applied to common Purposes of life, and when, by these Agriculture is improved, Trade enlarged, and the Arts of Living made more easy and comfortable, and of Course, the Increase and Happiness of Mankind promoted, Knowledge then becomes really useful.”
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Separately, Thomas Bond, the physician in Franklin's original scheme for a learned society back in the mid-1740s, had also resolved to resurrect their philosophical circle. Soon Philadelphia found itself with two rival groups, each competing for high-profile members, international contacts, and the attention of the general public. They even published their findings and announcements in separate Pennsylvania newspapers; Thomson's American Society preferred the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
, while Bond's old-line Philosophical Society favored the
Pennsylvania Gazette
.

In keeping with the tenor of contemporary life in the province, the two associations were largely divided along political lines. The American Society generally aligned with Franklin and the pro-Quaker faction, while Bond's reborn Philosophical Society hewed predominantly to the proprietary party. Class and social position also played their part: at least half the membership of the American Society came from the artisan and small merchant classes—the leather aprons; participants in the Philosophical Society were drawn primarily from the political and commercial elites.
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Prominent figures in both camps soon realized they would ultimately have to combine their efforts whatever their differences. After a number of false starts and a year or so of wary negotiations, a treaty of union was formally concluded December 20, 1768, and ratified shortly thereafter. “Two Societies having formerly subsisted in Philadelphia, whose views and ends were the same, viz. ‘
the Advancement of useful Knowledge
', it was judged that their Union would be of public advantage,” proclaimed the new joint association. Henceforth, the new body would be formally known by an amalgamation of their respective names: the American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge.
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Most simply referred to it as the American Philosophical Society, the name it retains to this day.

Prospects for the success of the new unified Society were enhanced by the symbolic election in absentia of Franklin as president, albeit with considerable reservations from the proprietary circle. Most prominent among Franklin's opponents, John Penn, a member of the proprietary family and the last governor of prerevolutionary Pennsylvania, angrily rebuffed the customary request that he serve as the Society's patron ex officio.

Thomas Bond, who had helped set the process of integration in motion, decried in a personal note to Franklin the inevitable politicking that surrounded the union and predicted that little good would come from the entire endeavor. “I long Meditated a Revival of our American Philosophical Society and at length I thought I saw my Way clear in doing it, but the Old party Leven split us for a Time,” he wrote to his old colleague in London. “We are now united and with your Presence may make a Figure, but till that happy Event, I fear much will not be done.”
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Several members of the Young Junto faction refused to join the united association, alleging the entire maneuver had been designed by the city's political and academic leadership to co-opt their earlier achievements. Before the union, the American Society had been busy presenting inventions by new members, including an automated “register” to control heat or fire and a power-driven pump to clear water from ships, and association members were keen to protect their intellectual property.
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Prominent among the dissidents was the physician Cadwalader Evans, who denounced the joint society and explained his withdrawal in a letter of his own to Franklin. “It was my opinion then, that the eagerness the Professors of the College showed for a Junction of the two Societies was to avail themselves of the Labors of others and filch reputation from their knowledge. Several instances have occurred to confirm it.”
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For the newly amalgamated American Philosophical Society, the 1769 transit of Venus, predicted for the afternoon of June 6, provided an ideal opportunity to rally around a scientific venture of global import. Its members were well aware that successful observations and the production of accurate data could secure for the Americans the respect of the skeptical European virtuosi. Closer to home, it would surely smooth over the hurt feelings created by the union and prove the doubters, defectors, and infighters wrong. Likewise, failure and the inevitable recriminations to follow could send the American Philosophical Society back into decline, perhaps permanently.

Franklin, of course, would have been the natural candidate to lead such a complex organizational and scientific endeavor. In his absence, the Philadelphians turned to another homegrown talent, the clockmaker and astronomer David Rittenhouse whose wondrous planetarium, or orrery, replicated the intricate movement of the planets and so captivated the American public. Rittenhouse and his colleagues got right to work determining the best observation points, procuring the necessary instruments, and lining up their observation teams.

From an early age it was clear that David Rittenhouse was a mechanical and mathematical prodigy, and he quite literally made the family farm his classroom. As a lad at work in the fields, David occupied his fertile mind with mathematical problems. His brother, Benjamin, recalled that when he fetched his older sibling from his chores “not only the fences at the head of many of the furrows, but even his plow and its handles, were covered over with chalked numerical figures.”
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Manual labor, according to Rittenhouse's nephew and chronicler William Barton, provided an appropriate beginning for this budding genius. It also served as a badge of honor for the new breed of American natural philosophers. “To follow the plow is not a servile labor,” Barton assured the readers of his
Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse
. “It is an employment worthy of a freeman, and if the person, thus engaged, be a man of native talents, aided by some improvement of mind, scarcely any occupation can afford him greater scope for philosophic reflection.”
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Rittenhouse was born in 1732 and spent his youth on the family's one hundred acres in Norriton, about twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. The adult Rittenhouse, recorded Barton, “was, in his stature, somewhat tall; in his person, slender and straight; and although his constitution was delicate, his bodily frame did not appear to have been, originally, weak; his gait was somewhat quick, and his movements in general were lively.”
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Inspired by a set of carpenter's tools, some handwritten notes and scribbled calculations, and a few basic mathematical texts left behind after the death of an uncle, twelve-year-old David displayed an early fascination and an uncommon facility with geometry and arithmetic. The tool chest provided Rittenhouse “some means of exercising the bent of his genius toward mechanism.”
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Soon he had convinced his reluctant father to allow him to set up shop on the farm as a maker of clocks. In time, he became known for designing and crafting scientific instruments of increasing sophistication, unquestioned utility, and real beauty.

Rittenhouse made his living primarily as a clockmaker from around 1750 until the outbreak of the Revolution. In the evenings, he pored over astronomical and mathematical texts, including a copy of Newton's
Principia
provided by his biographer's father, Thomas Barton, a teacher at the Philadelphia academy who later married Rittenhouse's elder sister. “This occupation, connected with that of a mathematical instrument maker, is such as may be well supposed to have presented itself to his youthful ingenuity; being in accordance with the philosophical bent of his genius in his early years, while yet untutored in science and unknown to the world,” wrote the ever-enthusiastic Barton.
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As seen by his contemporaries and memorialized shortly after his death, Rittenhouse fully embodied the new virtues of the new republic: he was self-directed and largely self-taught; he applied ingenious technical approaches to practical problems; his interests could not be contained within the restrictive confines of pure science; and he was not above putting down his clockmaker's tools or his astronomy books and getting his hands dirty, whether working the fields, running surveyors' lines along disputed provincial boundaries, or supervising the wartime production of gunpowder and cannon, or the design of fortifications.

Moreover, he had a propensity to think big. Not content to spin out well-fashioned clocks and the odd surveying instrument, Rittenhouse strained to outdo all others in his field. He designed the first-known portable metal thermometer and also produced fine telescopes and other astronomical instruments, balance scales, mercury barometers, and eyeglasses.
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Most spectacular of all was the design and construction of his extravagantly ambitious mechanical planetarium, which combined a sophisticated understanding of celestial motion with the highest order of mechanical skill and workmanship.

Like the public electricity demonstrations of Franklin and Kinnersley, such planetaria brought the latest in science into the salon and the lecture hall, part of the experiential approach to natural philosophy that characterized the times. The particular device that Rittenhouse had in mind—accurately mimicking the planets as they orbited the sun—took its name from the Fourth Earl of Orrery, for whom one of the first of its kind had been constructed sixty years earlier. The appeal of the orrery no doubt lay in its mechanical representation of a harmonious and constant natural world, reliably ticking along like clockwork in keeping with the vogue for the new Newtonian physics.

Yet, Rittenhouse had no intention of producing just any mechanical planetarium. “I did not design a machine which should give the ignorant in astronomy a just view of the Solar System: but would rather astonish the skilful and curious examiner, by a most accurate correspondence between the situations and motions of our little representatives of the heavenly bodies, and the situations and motions of those bodies, themselves,” he informed Thomas Barton in a letter of January 28, 1767. “I would have my Orrery really useful, by making it capable of informing us, truly, of the astronomical phenomena for any particular point of time; which, I do not find that any Orrery yet made, can do.”
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