Amber
Stich
Percival
D.E.
Astronomy
19
December 2014
David Rittenhouse Essay
David, the son of Matthias and
Elizabeth Williams Rittenhouse, was born on a farm in 1732, about 20 miles
north of Philadelphia in the town of Norriton. Of German Mennonite and Welsh
Quaker decent, Rittenhouse belonged to the Presbyterian Church and was given
informal education. Most of Rittenhouse’s education was self-taught.
Rittenhouse married Eleanor Coulston in 1766 and had two daughters. When Eleanor
died, Rittenhouse married Hannah Jacobs in 1772. Rittenhouse was of poor
health, mostly due to his duodenal ulcer. But despite his ailments, Rittenhouse
was a major contributor to both astronomy, and the early United States. Rittenhouse
spent most of his life in Philadelphia.
By
trade, Rittenhouse was a clock and mathematical instrument maker. He was known
for his workmanship. His astronomical clock used a pendulum he himself had designed.
Many of Rittenhouse’s instruments were so well made they were able to be
preserved to this day. His handmade instruments were far superior to any other
in the United States at that time. Some of the instruments Rittenhouse made
were surveyors’ compasses, levels, transits, telescopes, zenith sectors, thermometers,
barometers, a hygrometer, and eyeglasses. Rittenhouse was one of the early
users of spider webs over a telescope’s eyepiece to be used for cross hairs. He
also built a collimating telescope in his observatory. The Vernier compasses
Rittenhouse built were known in America as “Rittenhouse compasses”, and the
stove type he made for Benjamin Franklin’s fireplace were deemed a “Rittenhouse
stove”. Rittenhouse, among his experiments with pendulums, created the concept of
magnetic dipoles. During his diffraction studies, Rittenhouse created plane transmission
gratings, using fine wire across a frame and followed this by stating the law
of governing their displacement.
Though it was often overlooked –David
Rittenhouse played an important part in the development of Pennsylvania. Rittenhouse
was the most celebrated American surveyor; marking Pennsylvania’s borders with
its surrounding states. During the American Revolution, Rittenhouse helped
design the Delaware River defenses and worked on the production of saltpeter
and guns. Rittenhouse also experimented with telescope scopes for rifles and
cannons. Along with this, Rittenhouse participated in the forming of the Pennsylvanian
Constitution of 1776, the Board of War, and the vice-presidency of the Council
of Safety. Occasionally, Rittenhouse held the responsibility of executive
leadership of the state. From 1777-1798, Rittenhouse served as the treasurer of
Pennsylvania. And when Thomas Jefferson was working on his report for weights
and measured, he turned to Rittenhouse as a consultant and named him the first
director of the U.S. Mint in 1792.
Beginning in 1773, Rittenhouse moved
his talents to astronomy. Rittenhouse began supplying almanacs in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Virginia with astronomical calculations. Rittenhouse first
success was in his observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. He then
submitted the best American calculation contribution to the worldwide efforts
to establish the sun’s parallax. On his publishing of his initial volume of Transactions, which is where he
published most of his work, Rittenhouse was made the President of the American
Philosophical Society, succeeding Ben Franklin. Rittenhouse built all of the
instruments used by the Norriton observation group. To enable him to keep daily
records and conduct regular observations for his publishing data and
calculations on meteors, comets, Jupiter’s satellites, Mercury, Uranus and
various eclipses- Rittenhouse established the Philadelphia observatory.
Rittenhouse’s best published work was an original formula for finding the place
of a planet in its orbit. Rittenhouse also figured out logarithm calculations
as a study of the period of a pendulum. Rittenhouse may have independently
developed a system of calculus during his research of the area. Rittenhouse also
published various accounts of lightning, meteorology, geology, and aspects of
natural history.
Rittenhouse, a prominent American
figure of his time, is often overlooked by historians. Rittenhouse was the
power-house of behind-the-scenes work, overshadowed, but not underappreciated,
by public figures. He contributed major advancements in mathematical and astronomical
instruments, which he used himself to contribute valuable data to the scientific
community. Rittenhouse’s poor health was the cause of his death; he died on
June 26th, 1796 of cholera. His legacy was of being one of American’s
“untutored geniuses”.
