The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 34, August 5, 2005, Article 23

FEATURED WEB SITE

This week's featured web site is actually a trio of web pages
relating to U.S. Mint Director David Rittenhouse. The first is
an overview of his life, and the others relate to his clocks and
orreries.

"He became an astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker
and one of the leading American scientists of the eighteenth
century, second only to Benjamin Franklin.

Self-taught, he early showed mathematical and mechanical ability,
and mastered Newton's Principia in an English translation. As a
young boy Rittenhouse constructed a model of a watermill, and
by the age of seventeen he had built a wooden clock, but having
little opportunity to attend school, he largely educated himself
from books and a box of tools inherited from his uncle David
Williams, a furniture maker. At the age of nineteen he began
making clocks and other mechanical and scientific devices.

Over the next thirty or forty years he made many highly-prized
and innovative mathematical and astronomical instruments,
most famous of which were two orreries he constructed for
the Colleges of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and
Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). These
orreries show the solar and lunar eclipses and other phenomena
for a period of 5,000 years either forward or backward."

Rittenhouse

Rittenhouse Clock
Rittenhouse Orrery

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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