"The First African American Inventor" Benjamin Banneker was a brilliant astronomer and mathematician. He filled his lifetime with learning, and it all began with his fascination with a pocket watch! Benjamin Bannaky was born in Maryland, America, on November 9th 1731. He was taught to read and write by his English grandmother, Molly, who used her bible as a lesson book. Molly had been accused of stealing milk and had been sent to America from England to become a slave for seven years. After that time, she was freed and she bought a farm with two slaves to help look after it. Molly freed the slaves and married one of them called Bannaky. They had several children, including a girl called Mary. When Mary grew up, she too bought a farm and hired a slave, who she later freed and married. He was Benjamin’s father and Mary was Benjamin’s mother. Since both his mother and father were free, Benjamin was born free at a time when most black people in America were slaves. When Benjamin was young, there were no schools nearby so he taught himself using books he borrowed. One summer, a school teacher moved into the valley and he set up a school for boys. Benjamin attended the school and soon his teacher changed the spelling of Benjamin’s surname to Banneker. Benjamin was particularly good at science and mathematics at school and he also played the flute and the violin. Benjamin grew up on the family farm which was known as ‘Bannaky Springs’ because of the water springs on the land. As Benjamin got older, he built a series of ditches and dams to control the water from the springs to water the crops. His system was so good that the family’s tobacco crops always grew well even during droughts. When Benjamin was 22 years old, he borrowed a pocket watch from his wealthy neighbour. He was fascinated with the watch. He had never seen anything like it before in his life so he took it apart to study how it worked. He made detailed drawings of all the components of the watch and drew diagrams of how they all fitted together. He then reassembled the watch and gave it back to his neighbour in working order. Benjamin didn’t stop there. He used his drawings to make enlarged parts of the watch out of wood. He used maths to work out the number of teeth on each cog inside the watch and how to figure out the relationships between the cogs. He then put all his parts together and made the first striking clock built completely in America. The amazing thing is; he had never seen a clock before in his life! Benjamin’s clock struck every hour and worked for the rest of his life. Because of the clock, he became well known in the area and people would bring him their broken watches to repair. By this time, he had also developed a reputation for solving difficult mathematical puzzles. Here is one puzzle he devised himself: Divide 60 into four such parts that the first being increased by 4, the second decreased by 4, the third multiplied by 4, the fourth part divided by 4, that the sum, the difference, the product and the quotient shall be one and the same number. Click here for the solution In 1772, a man named George Ellicott moved into the area, he and Benjamin became good friends and over the years they shared their interest in science. In 1788, George gave Benjamin some astronomy books and instruments to watch the night sky. At the age of 57, Benjamin taught himself the complicated maths, such as geometry, algebra and trigonometry, and the astronomy he needed to become an astronomer. He became so interested in the night sky that he slept all day and watched the stars at night. He built a shed with a window in the roof to study the stars, but most nights he would wrap himself in a blanket and lie under a pear tree. From his studies of the stars, Benjamin found lots of mistakes in current astronomy books, so he put together his own astronomy tables and wrote an almanac. His almanac contained a calendar listing various events happening in the night sky. In his almanac he predicted solar and lunar eclipses and in fact, he successfully predicted the solar eclipse that occurred on April 14th 1789, contradicting the forecasts of prominent astronomers of that time. Benjamin’s almanac was published and sales of it were very high indeed. Around this time, George Ellicott’s cousin asked Benjamin to help with designing the capital city of America, Washington D.C. A man called Pierre L'Enfant was the person in charge of planning the city. He was a bad-tempered man, and because of his temper, he was told to leave the project. When he left, Pierre took all the plans with him, but luckily Benjamin remembered the plans and recreated them from memory. It saved the government the cost of hiring someone else to design the capital. Benjamin spent his remaining years at the family farm, studying and carrying out scientific experiments. He published a paper on bees and carried a mathematical study into locusts. He was also a keen campaigner of the anti-slavery movement. Although Benjamin was born a free man, slavery was a major concern to him. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who later became the third President of America, Benjamin wrote about the many difficulties and disadvantages which he had to encounter as an African American. Benjamin Banneker died on October 9th 1806 at the age of 74. On the day of his funeral, the Banneker farm burnt to the ground and his laboratory and his famous clock were destroyed. Only one journal which Banneker had written was not in the house and so it survived. Every other record of his achievements were lost in the fire. In an age when some people thought that black people were intellectually inferior, Benjamin Banneker showed the heights to which a black person could rise if given the opportunity. He lived a life of great achievement. ..."Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties..." Banneker's Almanac 1794 Go back