The Society for Useful Knowledge (26 page)

Taking a page from his 1743 manifesto on useful knowledge, Franklin sent a directive reminding “all Captains & Commanders of armed Ships acting by Commission from the Congress of the United States of America” that “the Increase of Geographical Knowledge facilitates the Communication between distant Nations, in the Exchange of useful Products and Manufactures, and the Extension of Arts, whereby the common Enjoyments of human Life are multiplied and augmented, and Science of other kinds increased to the Benefit of Mankind in general.” They were to “treat the said Captain Cook and his People with all Civility and Kindness, affording them as common Friends to Mankind, all the Assistance in your Power which they may happen to stand in need of.”
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Franklin's “passport” for the Pacific expedition elicited a letter of thanks from Joseph Banks, a veteran of Cook's first mission that had included observation of the 1769 transit of Venus from the southern vantage point of Tahiti. Banks was now president of the Royal Society, and soon the pair began a steady correspondence that extended into the postwar period.

Franklin's diplomatic post in Paris, while essential to the long-term success of the Americans, was for now a sideshow to the Revolution. Closer to home, few proponents of the useful knowledge movement loomed as large as David Rittenhouse. In a sign of the growing interconnectedness of American science, Virginia's Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge had recently added Rittenhouse, along with Franklin, Rush, and other Philadelphia luminaries, to its rolls.
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Soon plans were afoot to secure for Rittenhouse a government appointment as Pennsylvania's first public astronomical observer, but the long, drawn-out affair was ultimately abandoned in the face of war with the British.

Despite his considerable scientific achievement and growing reputation, Rittenhouse—like Franklin—continued throughout his lifetime to identify himself as an artisan or mechanic, albeit one who labored at the intersection of engineering and science. One of his favorite sources of information was the
General Magazine of Arts and Sciences
, published by a London instrument maker and directed at a general audience. Rittenhouse was also an avid reader of the colonial press, which regularly featured reports of scientific discoveries, medical advances, and other technical breakthroughs. It was telling, then, that Rittenhouse signed a detailed letter to the
Pennsylvania Gazette
about Newton and Archimedes simply “A Mechanic.”
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Rittenhouse was drawn into revolutionary activism through his membership in Pennsylvania's militant Mechanics Association, which held a mass protest against the British at the State House in June 1774. The association, originally formed as part of a colonies-wide movement of patriotic artisans and craftsmen, named the celebrated instrument maker to a special committee to work with fraternal societies along the Eastern Seaboard in opposition to the British and to their Royalist allies among the rich and powerful. The association also passed a resolution in support of a Continental Congress to address the growing crisis.
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A similar organization in New York City, the General Committee of Mechanics, also backed the Congress and soon demanded outright independence from Great Britain.
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To the north, in Boston, perhaps the most famous hero of the early days of the Revolution, Paul Revere, was himself a mechanic and, later, an industrialist, entrepreneur, and innovator in the working of copper and other metals. Many members of Revere's immediate family were also artisans, including carpenters, metalsmiths, and shipwrights.

Additional sources of the growing influence of mechanics and other leather aprons in colonial affairs included the provincial militia movement, the fire
companies, and the Masonic lodges—all beneficiaries of Franklin's earlier exertions—as well as specific craft associations such as the Tailors Company and the Carpenters' Company. These institutions were backed by the master printers and the presses they controlled, and by the prestige of the American Philosophical Society, which counted many leading mechanics and artisans among its ranks.
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The mechanics, often supported by the small farmers, were particularly powerful in Pennsylvania, where Franklin, Rittenhouse, and others crafted a provincial constitution that gave full voice to their interests at the expense of the local elite. After all, argued one of their own in the
Pennsylvania Evening Post
, they represented the true voice of the new republic. “Do not mechanics and farmers constitute ninety-nine of a hundred of the people of America? … Is not half the property in the city of Philadelphia owned by men who wear LEATHERN APRONS? Does not the other half belong to men whose fathers or grandfathers wore LEATHERN APRONS?”
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Throughout the revolutionary period, the leather aprons were steadfast in their support for key elements of grassroots democracy, including secret ballot, direct election, and limited tenure in public office, all of which were enshrined in the new Pennsylvania constitution. They also supported strong centralized powers for the federal government—first to combat the British and, after independence, to construct a new, postwar economy based on expanded domestic production and overseas trade.
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Armed conflict with Britain began in earnest in April 1775. Cut off by the British navy from trade with the outside world, and short of everything from gunpowder and ammunition to provisions, uniforms, blankets, and cannon, the rebellious colonies were impelled toward greater self-sufficiency. To help address the acute lack of war materiel, Pennsylvania's Committee of Safety, created to oversee the local military effort, turned to some of the province's leading mechanics. These included Rittenhouse and his fellow watchmaker and astronomer Owen Biddle.

Both were members of the American Philosophical Society, and they had been instrumental in the association's observations of the transit of Venus in 1769, when Biddle led the observation team at Cape Henlopen. The inclusion of Biddle and Rittenhouse on the Committee of Safety, the latter as chief engineer, reflected Americans' faith in the practical utility of both scientists and scientific knowledge. Mechanics and other artisans had already taken the lead
in many of the urban campaigns for nonimportation of British goods, and now they assumed prominent positions in the war effort itself.
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The chief engineer's new duties included surveying defensive fortifications, inspecting prototype naval vessels, and overseeing the production of munitions. “Rittenhouse is a mechanic; a mathematician, a philosopher, and an astronomer. Biddle is said to be a great mathematician,” Adams, who joined the two men on a tour of ten new Pennsylvania warships, noted in his diary. “Rittenhouse is a tall slender man, plain, soft, modest, no remarkable depth or thoughtfulness in his face, yet cool, attentive, and clear.”
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Six months later, Adams won the approval of the Continental Congress for a resolution that local authorities “take the earliest measures for erecting and establishing, in each and every colony a society for the improvement of agriculture, arts, manufactures, and commerce, and to maintain a correspondence between such societies, that the rich and numerous natural advantages of this country, for supporting its inhabitants, may not be neglected.” The Congress then called for specific steps to introduce or improve production of canvas, sailcloth, and steel in preparation for war.
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At Rittenhouse's recommendation, the Pennsylvania Committee contracted with a local ironmonger for new artillery, although his suggestion, based on his own experiments, that the cannon barrels be rifled to improve their accuracy proved beyond the capabilities of the province's modest industry.
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Other government-backed projects sought to increase the output of such strategic commodities as iron and paper. Meanwhile, Franklin was conspiring with the French military in Paris to secretly provide “skilled engineers, not exceeding four” to aid the American cause.
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War has always provided a spur to technological innovation, and American experimenters stepped forward with a number of ingenious ideas for new or improved weapons to deploy against superior British firepower. Among the most ambitious was David Bushnell's miniature submarine, powered by hand and designed to slip silently alongside an enemy ship and attach an explosive, on a timed fuse, to the hull. Bushnell received financial support for his scheme, immediately dubbed Bushnell's Turtle, from the Connecticut legislature, but his several attempts against the British fleet in New York harbor were thwarted by his inability to affix the bomb to its target.

Hampered by a lack of experience and of anything resembling an industrial base, efforts by the rebels to stimulate wartime production made little real
progress. Even when victory was in sight, General Washington recognized that America's army would long remain dependent on European expertise. “A Peace Establishment is now under consideration, in which it is recommended that Congress should form Military Academies & Manufactories as part of this Establishment,” he wrote in 1783 to a senior French officer, Brigadier General Louis Lebègue Duportail, then the Continental Army's commandant of engineers. Washington went on to suggest that the services of the French engineering corps be retained for this purpose after the war. The French declined but Duportail provided a list of ideas for such an institution, a number of which the Americans would later adopt.
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As short as the rebels were of warships and cannon, they were in greatest need of gunpowder. At the outbreak of fighting, the colonies had only limited, aging supplies on hand, most dating back to the Seven Years' War. According to one estimate, the Americans entered the fray with just eighty thousand pounds of black powder, half of which had already been frittered away by the ill-disciplined troops by the time Washington formally assumed command of the Continental Army in July 1775.
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“Our want of powder is inconceivable. A daily waste and no supply administers a gloomy prospect,” Washington reported from his headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day.
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To keep the British in the dark about the dwindling supply of powder, the Americans periodically lobbed a lone cannonball in the enemy's general direction from a hilltop outside Boston.

Officials in Philadelphia put Rittenhouse in charge of securing potassium nitrate, commonly known as saltpeter and the central ingredient in gunpowder. Across the colonies, the authorities sought to promote the mining and collection of the precious substance. The Second Continental Congress distributed recipes for homemade powder to the various colonies and offered substantial bounties to spur large-scale production. Efforts were made to forage for potassium nitrate residue from farmyards, the floors of tobacco warehouses, stables, cellars, and dovecotes.

Rittenhouse threw himself into the subject, consulting the scientific and military literature and sounding out his more learned friends and associates on the subject, yet the drive for domestic production fell far short of expectations. By far the bulk of the black powder used by the Americans, particularly in the early years of the war, was smuggled from France, by way of the West Indies.
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Rittenhouse had better luck with the thankless task of juggling Pennsylvania's
disastrous finances as its treasurer from 1777 to 1789, invoking sleight of hand accounting as well as his undoubted arithmetic skills to somehow keep the debt-ridden state afloat.

British troops overran Philadelphia in late September 1777, forcing the dispersal of the Second Continental Congress as well as Pennsylvania's government. What little scientific activity that had survived the early war years now came to a halt. Like many of the other colonial educational institutions, the grounds of the academy were given over to the billeting of soldiers and treatment of the wounded. However, Provost Smith, no enthusiast for American independence, successfully prevailed upon the British commander to safeguard the school's prized Rittenhouse orrery throughout the occupation.
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The British withdrawal from the city nine months later opened the way for a gradual resuscitation of intellectual life, grouped around the American Philosophical Society and the College of Philadelphia. Rittenhouse and Jefferson, who was then in Williamsburg, Virginia, even managed to exchange letters on their respective attempts to observe a major eclipse on June 28, 1778, and the latter chided his friend for failing to complete construction of a timepiece that would have greatly aided the effort. Jefferson could not refrain from worrying about the demands of Rittenhouse's government posts when he might better spend his time in pursuit of more useful matters. “You should consider that the world has but one Rittenhouse, and that it never had one before.”
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The gradual winding down of the war after the British defeat at Yorktown allowed Rittenhouse to turn his attention back to the American Philosophical Society, and he was elected to the organization's newly formed governing council in 1783, in the company of Jefferson and other veterans of the independence effort. Recent events had been hard on the Society, whose internal divisions had been exacerbated by what Francis Hopkinson, son of one of Franklin's original “electricians” and an inaugural graduate of the Philadelphia academy, called the “dreary tempest of war.”

With independence, Hopkinson warned his colleagues, America risked disappointing the Europeans, who were now turning to the new nation not so much for political inspiration as for future intellectual leadership. “They look towards us as a country that may be a great nursery of arts and sciences, as a country affording an extensive field of improvement in agriculture, natural
history, and other branches of useful knowledge.”
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In order to justify these hopes and realize the full benefits of sovereignty, America had to redouble its efforts in scientific study, experimentation, and invention.