Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker was born free in 1731 in Baltimore County, Maryland, the grandson of a formerly enslaved African man and an English indentured servant. He had almost no formal schooling but educated himself so thoroughly that by his early twenties he had constructed, from memory and a borrowed pocket watch, the first wooden striking clock made in America — a device he carved entirely by hand that kept accurate time for more than 50 years. He taught himself astronomy from borrowed books and instruments, and by the late 1780s he was producing almanacs whose astronomical calculations he performed entirely by hand, without assistance.

In 1791 Banneker was appointed to the survey team that laid out the boundaries of Washington, D.C., becoming one of the first African Americans to receive a presidential appointment — a commission extended by Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State. That same year he sent Jefferson a copy of his almanac and a letter that remains one of the most pointed documents of the founding era: he reminded Jefferson of his own words in the Declaration of Independence and challenged him to account for the contradiction between those words and his ownership of enslaved people. Jefferson replied courteously and forwarded the almanac to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris.

Banneker published almanacs annually from 1792 to 1797, distributing them across the mid-Atlantic states. Abolitionists used them as evidence that Black Americans were intellectually capable — a point that should not have required evidence — and his correspondence with Jefferson was reprinted in pamphlets. He spent his later years alone on his farm in Maryland, continuing to study the stars and keep his journals. He died in 1806. His journals and notebooks were destroyed in a fire the day of his funeral, and much of what is known about him comes from the almanacs and the Jefferson correspondence.