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Benjamin Banneker (1731 - 1806)
At the age of twenty-one, Banneker borrowed a patent pocket watch from a neighbor, taking the timepiece apart and studying and diagramming its components before putting it back together in perfect working order. He then used the diagrams to build a clock, carving the components out of wood. This remarkable clock kept perfect time for over forty years. While helping to run the family farm, Benjamin Banneker also developed a side-line repairing and making watches and clocks. One of his customers loaned him books on astronomy and advanced mathematics, and this led to another side-line, as Banneker began publishing his own almanac, which proved a big seller in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. His other accomplishments included an ingenious system of dams and irrigation canals which insured a bountiful tobacco crop year after year, and a mathematical study of the life cycle of the seventeen-year locust. Banneker inherited the tobacco farm, now called Bannaky Springs, and continued growing tobacco as well as publishing his almanacs and running his timepiece repair shop. When Major Andrew Ellicot was commissioned in 1791 to survey the area allotted for the capitol of the newly formed United States, he asked Banneker to assist him. Ellicott's cousin, George Ellicott, had been the customer and family friend who loaned Banneker the books that began his career as an amateur engineer and scientist. (George and the life-long bachelor Banneker were also lovers.) When Pierre L'Enfant, the architect commissioned to build the US Capitol Building and other important structures for Washington quit in a fit of temper and took his plans with him back to France, Congress feared that a new architect would have to be found and new designs drawn up at additional expense. But Banneker, who had been working closely with L'Enfant, had studied and memorized his diagrams. He was able to redraw the plans from memory, and the buildings were constructed as scheduled. Banneker's genius impressed President Thomas Jefferson enough to write him a letter of praise, in which he said that Banneker's accomplishments were proof that, contrary to the racist attitudes of the time, blacks were not in any way inferior to whites. Jefferson also forwarded a copy of Banneker's almanac to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Despite this praise, however, Banneker's fame did not extend far beyond the town limits of Ellicott City. His work in Washington was his only significant trip away from his tobacco farm, as Banneker preferred to live largely as a hermit and to not travel and to receive only a few visitors, so more time could be devoted to his studies. While he continued making and recording astronomical calculations and observations for the remainder of his life, declining sales forced him to discontinue his almanac. Benjamin Banneker died on 26 October, 1806. On the day of his burial, his home burned to the ground, and the site itself was forgotten until historians rediscovered the site in the 1990s. It has also been only recently that Banneker's contributions to the early history and development of the US have been brought back to light, after over a hundred years of being buried, forgotten, and ignored.
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