The Society for Useful Knowledge (23 page)

According to Rittenhouse's detailed specifications, this revolutionary planetarium would for the first time reproduce the elliptical orbits of the planets in place of the conventional and far simpler, but less accurate, circular ones. Each of these orbits would revolve at fluctuating speed and in its own plane relative to the earth. A miniature telescope placed on the model of the earth and then used to sight a planet would generate its accurate celestial coordinates.

The device would track the movement of Jupiter and its multiple moons, Saturn and its rings, as well as the exact time and nature of all lunar eclipses. The entire machine, run by “a strong pendulum clock” or operated independently by a winch, was designed to display accurate astronomical data for a period of five thousand years in either direction. “It must be understood that all these motions are to correspond exactly with the celestial motions, and not to differ to some
Degrees
from the truth, as is common in orreries.”
²⁹
It would also play music.

Rittenhouse's outsized ambitions for his orrery—some of which he was forced to jettison as impractical—created a sensation in the colonial press and touched off a bidding war between the Pennsylvania virtuosi, led chiefly by Provost William Smith, and their rivals at the College of New Jersey, who swooped in with a cash deal to secure the rights to the as-yet-unfinished device. Rittenhouse only managed to placate his Philadelphia supporters by producing a second such orrery, even grander and more complex than the first.

Excitement over the orreries established Rittenhouse as the province's preeminent instrument maker and gradually drew him away from the peaceful surroundings of his Norriton farm. He spent more and more time in nearby Philadelphia, in the hopes of expanding the clientele for his instrument business and securing patronage for his scientific projects from among the provincial authorities and the city's wealthy and powerful.
³⁰

With some reluctance, Rittenhouse entered fully into Philadelphia's politicized intellectual life. He had already been elected a member of Charles Thomson's American Society, and he now began work on the upcoming transit of Venus on behalf of the joint philosophical association. The feverish pace of these preparations forced Rittenhouse to put a temporary halt to work on his orreries. It also undermined his fragile health, which was plagued from his youth by what may have been a chronic duodenal ulcer. He was later rewarded for these efforts with his election as one of three secretaries of the American Philosophical Society—and, after Franklin's death, as its second president.

With past divisions largely behind it, the Philosophical Society was able to secure public funds for its transit project from the Pennsylvania Assembly and private support from the Library Company. Franklin, meanwhile, commissioned a prominent London firm to produce a state-of-the-art reflecting telescope for the Society's use, paid for by Thomas Penn and later housed at the University of Pennsylvania. A number of citizens agreed to underwrite observation posts.

Almost two dozen independent teams, from Canada to Virginia, supplemented the more organized efforts of the knowledge associations and the universities, many of them funneling their data through the American Philosophical Society for verification, collation, and dissemination. Britain's royal astronomer published a forty-four-page instructional pamphlet to guide the worldwide effort. John Winthrop, the Harvard mathematics professor, now too infirm to repeat his exploits in Newfoundland eight years earlier, delivered a series of popular lectures on the importance of the transit.
³¹
He later carefully reworked data collected from numerous teams in a concerted and largely successful effort to smooth out many of the inevitable observational errors.

Mounting public interest in the transit of 1769 further enhanced the role of science in colonial life, and with it the status of the American Philosophical Society. Local newspapers provided detailed accounts of the individual observation teams, while wealthy amateurs vied with one another to acquire the most up-to-date astronomical apparatus. Each post required, at the bare minimum, a telescope and an accurate means of telling time, but other instruments were often deployed as well. These included quadrants, sextants, barometers, and thermometers.
³²

In Providence, Rhode Island, members of the general public helped a private observation party, directed by self-taught mathematician Benjamin West and
financed by a local businessman, to set their clocks by the position of the sun. “That our observations might be as useful as possible,” West later recounted, “notice was given beforehand to the people (whose curiosity was excited by the preparations) that on the day before the transit, when the Sun came on the meridian, a cannon would be fired, which being done, most of the inhabitants marked meridian lines on their windows, or on their floors” to help synchronize their clocks and watches.
³³

The American Philosophical Society focused its primary efforts on two well-equipped observation points, one at the State House in central Philadelphia and the other at Rittenhouse's farm in Norriton. A more ambitious plan that would have sent an expedition into upstate New York to observe the transit and then stay on to explore the Hudson River valley was rejected.
³⁴
A third observation point was established at Cape Henlopen, on Delaware Bay, but the Norriton post under Rittenhouse's immediate direction received the most attention and resources from the Society. Assisting Rittenhouse in the observations and timekeeping were William Smith, provost of the College of Pennsylvania; the province's chief surveyor; a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly; and several assistants to record the time and other data.

This lead observation team was equipped with three optical telescopes, including the largest refractor telescope in America, its lenses purpose-built in London. According to Smith's account, other devices on hand included “an excellent clock; a transit telescope, nicely moving in the plane of the meridian; and a very accurate equal altitude instrument, supported in the observatory on a stone pedestal,” all built by Rittenhouse himself.
³⁵
Rittenhouse had also constructed a temporary observatory platform at his farm, and his team worked out an elaborate series of hand signals that would allow the three observers to inform the timekeepers of their sightings of the start and end of the transit without distracting the others or prejudicing their observations.

By the morning of the transit, Rittenhouse was clearly exhausted. He had already spent many months, often outside in the cold late at night, taking careful astronomical readings in preparation for the big event. His clock had to be regularly adjusted, the micrometer attached to one of the telescopes needed periodic testing and recalibration, and the exact coordinates of the observatory had to be determined, checked, and checked again. He even had to install the new British-made refractor lenses himself. Rittenhouse was also acutely aware that he would get no second chance to record and measure a major
astronomical phenomenon that could unlock one of the mysteries of the known universe: its actual size. The next transit was not due for another 105 years.

The observations at Norriton began smoothly enough, with each team member buried in his own assigned task, but the tightly wound Rittenhouse was soon overcome with emotion. “In pensive silence and trembling anxiety, they waited for the predicted moment of observation,” recalled Benjamin Rush years later in a public eulogy for his old friend. “It came and … in our philosopher, it excited in the instant of one of the contacts of the planet with the sun an emotion of delight so exquisite and powerful as to induce fainting.”
³⁶

William Smith and the others kept working and Rittenhouse recovered sufficiently to observe the rest of the transit. He never personally referred to his fainting spell, which could have dashed all his hopes, although he did acknowledge the powerful spiritual effect of watching the transit unfold. Somehow, the Norriton team still managed to collect some of the most accurate and useful data from among the more than seventy-five observation posts worldwide. A later analysis of the Norriton figures suggested a mean distance between the earth and the sun of around 93 million miles, not far off today's accepted value of 92.955 million miles.

The efforts by the Philosophical Society to observe and record the transit helped seal its position as America's premier knowledge association, with the scientifically inclined from across the colonies eagerly lining up for membership. Energized by the experience, members of the Society took another large step toward integration into the global scientific community, with the publication in 1771 of the first volume of their official
Transactions
. Almost the entire first section of the new journal was devoted to the colonials' reports on the transit of Venus, or related problems, and it won the American Philosophical Society considerable attention and even praise from Europe.

Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, lauded the Americans in a letter to proprietor Thomas Penn, who had passed along the Society's data: “I thank you for the account of the Pennsylvania Observations which seem
excellent
and
complete
, and do Honor to the Gentlemen who made them.”
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From Stockholm came predictions that great things lay ahead for colonial science. “I have been agreeably surprised to observe the rapid progress of your American Society,” wrote Carl Magnus Wrangel, who later became one of the Society's earliest overseas members. “Your accurate Observations of the Transit of Venus have
given infinite satisfaction to our astronomers; as will the rest of your
Transactions
, to the literary world, when they come to be further known.”
³⁸

Until the late 1760s, Benjamin Franklin remained a sincere, if at times frustrated, supporter of what he recalled with residual fondness “that fine and noble China Vase the British Empire.”
³⁹
After all, the primary aim of his second political mission to London, in late 1764, was to curry support for removing the proprietary Penn family from power and placing the province under the direct control of the Crown—perhaps with Franklin himself as royal governor.

He felt considerable disquiet over the rowdy protests then gripping the colonies against British tax and trade policies. Not even the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765, which so outraged the Americans and threatened to ruin Franklin's fellow printers, including his reliable business partner David Hall, could sway him at first. Franklin went so far as to nominate an associate back home as a collector for the new taxes, a move that immediately exposed his friend's life and property to mob violence.

This apparent lack of enthusiasm for the American point of view saw Franklin's public standing back in Pennsylvania plummet. Benjamin Rush, the revolutionary physician whom Franklin had assisted years earlier, broke temporarily with his mentor: “O Franklin, Franklin, thou curse to PA and America, may the most accumulated vengeance burst speedily in thy guilty head.”
⁴⁰
Cut off in London from the fast pace of political and social developments in the colonies and frustrated in his attempts to carve out a place of his own in British society, Franklin found himself alienated from both England and his native America.

Still, he could not easily shake his long-held conviction that the economic and political interests of both America and Great Britain were one and the same. “I am not much alarmed about your Schemes of raising Money on us,” Franklin wrote to a sympathetic British parliamentarian, shortly before the firestorm over the Stamp Act broke out in the colonies. “You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burdens on us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting yourselves.”
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His serious miscalculation over the reaction at home to aggressive efforts by Britain to levy new taxes and to reassert its absolute authority over the colonies was only the most acute symptom of his increasing isolation.

By late 1768, the strain had begun to show. “I do not find that I have gained any point in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality, in England of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.”
⁴²
Seeking to restore his name and political fortunes back home, Franklin reversed himself on the Stamp Act and testified before Parliament for its repeal. Soon enough, his zeal for independence was ignited—perhaps burning all the brighter for his earlier reticence and for his ill-treatment by the ruling elite of a nation he had deeply admired ever since his first visit as an aspiring young printer more than forty years earlier. There would be, he had realized, no royal appointment after all.
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His London mission in shambles, Franklin returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1775. He immediately threw himself into American politics, taking a seat in the Second Continental Congress, designing a new colonial currency, and helping to edit Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. He used his newspaper and his pen to great effect in support of the rebellion, taking a more forthright public position on outright independence than many other colonial politicians. Franklin's private views toward the British, however, were more complex, and he did his best to maintain cordial relations throughout the conflict in discreet correspondence with many of his former friends and associates back in London.

The general ineffectiveness of political and economic resistance that preceded the Revolution had already revealed many of the structural weaknesses of late colonial America. These included a minute manufacturing base, over reliance on single crops in the agricultural southlands, the inability to access foreign markets, an unstable currency regime and a lack of capital, lingering opposition among the provinces to greater integration, and an acute shortage of scientific and technical skills. Moreover, Britain's powerful navy controlled the Atlantic shipping lanes and, with them, communications to Europe and among the more distant colonies themselves. The start of armed rebellion against the Crown would transform these practical difficulties into outright threats to the entire project of American independence.