Science

The expansion of new areas of settlement, the preoccupation with fighting the Revolutionary War (1775-83), and the creation of a new nation left little room for purely theoretical science in the United States. Practical science became dominant—called natural philosophy at the time— and included biology, botany, invention, and the physical sciences.

There were two kinds of pure scientists in this period: those who had the money and leisure to pursue their investigations independently and those who taught at colleges. Because of the religious orientation of most institutions of higher learning before the Revolutionary War, science was not initially an important part of the curriculum. Thus most scientists were independent scholars. After the war, the number of colleges expanded, and science became regularly taught. Despite the addition of science to the curriculum, the universities were still only training undergraduates, not postgraduate scientists.

The pursuit of science also depended upon communicating the results of study. Before the 1760s, no major scientific societies existed in British North America. Therefore, most of the publications by colonial scientists appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a journal produced by the Royal Society of London. This participation in an English scientific society diminished in the decade preceding the Revolutionary War, due mostly to the resistance movement (1764-75) but also to the rise of two important North American societies. The first appeared in Philadelphia and was called the American Philosophical Society (1769). Benjamin Franklin helped to attract scientific interest in the City of Brotherly Love with his experiments and lectures on electricity. The second major society was American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780) established in Boston.

Government provided little support for science. A survey of the active scientists of the time and their work illustrates the crucial role that individual men played in the foundations of science in the United States. In the realm of theory, mathematician Robert Adrian independently proved the law of least squares, and Theodore Strong proved Stewart’s circle theorem in 1814. Born in colonial America, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) went into exile after the Revolutionary War because of his work as a spy for the British. He was, however, an important physicist whose investigations on heat served as the foundation for the modern theory on the mechanical nature of heat.

Most science in this period was not theoretical; instead, it was practical and observable. David Rittenhouse was an important Philadelphian astronomer and inventor, proficient in practical and observational astronomy. In 1769 he built the first astronomical telescope in British North America, and in 1793 he discovered a comet. Another important astronomer was W. C. Bond, an untrained instrument and clockmaker who later became the director of Harvard College Observatory. In 1811 he discovered a comet, using the telescope he had set up in the parlor of his home. Robert Hare was a professor of chemistry who invented two important tools for chemical analysis: the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, in 1801, and the deflagrator, a device that created a powerful electric arc, in 1820. In geology, Amos Eaton published his famous work, Index to the Geology of the Northern States, in 1818.

North Americans were active in botany and zoology. Scientists in Europe were interested in North American flora and fauna for comparative study. In the early colonial period, the emphasis was on collecting plants and animals to be shipped back to Europe for study and analysis. In the late colonial and revolutionary periods, North American scientists began to undertake their own study and publish their own collections of data. The foremost botanist of colonial America was John Bartram. He traveled extensively throughout the East Coast collecting plants and seeds. He exchanged information, as well as specimens, with many of the leading European botanist of the time. He published two books, one on the area from Lake Ontario to Pennsylvania, in 1751, and one on Florida, in 1766. Benjamin Smith Barton, W. P. C. Barton, Jacob Bigelow, Thomas Nuttall, and John Terry all published important botanical works in the early 19th century. The two Bartons were an uncle and nephew who worked as professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Bigelow and Nuttall were both students of Benjamin Smith Barton, and Terry was a doctor who worked as a professor at West Point, Princeton, and Columbia. In zoology, the work of Alexander Wilson was the most important of this time. Born in Scotland, he moved to Philadelphia in 1794. In 1802 he met the son of John Bartram, William Bartram, who stimulated his interest in ornithology. From 1808 to 1813 he publish the seven volumes of his work American Ornithology.

Practical inventors and tinkerers had the greatest impact on society. While not trained scientists, such men

David Rittenhouse constructed the first working model of the solar system in 1767 and built an observatory to watch the movement of Venus. Engraving (Library of Congress)

Pushed technological innovation in important directions. Samuel Slater left England in 1789 with the blueprints of textile machinery in his head. He built the first successful textile factory in the United States and began the Industrial Revolution in North America. Robert Fulton experimented with the steam engine as a means of driving boats on rivers. His steamboat, the Clermont, transformed communication and transportation within a decade of its first appearance on the Hudson River in 1807. And Eli Whitney’s cotton gin altered the course of agriculture in the South and allowed for the establishment of the Cotton Kingdom.

Further reading: Silvio Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers: Early American Men of Science (New York: Scribner’s, 1975); John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984); Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956); Raymond P. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).