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 Who
Was Benjamin Banneker?
Benjamin Banneker was born in
Maryland on November 9, 1731. His father and grandfather
were former slaves.
A farmer
of modest means, Banneker nevertheless lived a life of
unusual achievement. In 1753, the young man borrowed a
pocket watch from a well-to-do neighbor; he took it apart
and made a drawing of each component, then reassembled the
watch and returned it, fully functioning, to its owner.
From his drawings Banneker then
proceeded to carve, out of wood, enlarged replicas of each
part. Calculating the proper number of teeth for each gear
and the necessary relationships between the gears, he
constructed a working wooden clock that kept accurate time
and struck the hours for over 50 years.
At age 58, Banneker began the
study of astronomy and was soon predicting future solar and
lunar
 eclipses.
He compiled the ephemeris, or information table, for annual
almanacs that were published for the years 1792 through
1797. "Benjamin Banneker's Almanac" was a top seller from
Pennsylvania to Virginia and even into Kentucky.
In 1791,
Banneker was a technical assistant in the calculating and
first-ever surveying of the Federal District, which is now
Washington, D.C.
The
"Sable Astronomer" was often pointed to as proof that
African Americans were not intellectually inferior to
European Americans. Thomas Jefferson himself noted this in a
letter to Banneker.
Banneker
died on Sunday, October 9, 1806 at the age of 74. A few
small memorial traces still exist in the Ellicott City/Oella
region of Maryland, where Banneker spent his entire life
except for the Federal survey. It was not until the 1990s
that the actual site of Banneker's home, which burned on the
day of his burial, was determined.
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