The Society for Useful Knowledge (30 page)

Rittenhouse, whose health was never very strong, at first begged off the assignment, but he was cajoled into accepting by his old friend Jefferson, who as secretary of state was responsible for the Mint, and by a direct appeal from President Washington. Despite his growing infirmity, such a project must have held considerable appeal for Rittenhouse, for it drew on his considerable practical skills—as a surveyor, an instrument maker, an engineer, and general problem solver. Among the challenges facing the new director were the refining of silver for the production of coins and the regulation of the exact amount of the precious metal that should go into each one.

“He directed the construction of the machinery; [and] made arrangements for providing the necessary apparatus,” records his nephew Barton. “And, in daily visits to the Mint, whenever his health permitted, personally superintended, with the most sedulous fidelity, not only the general economy of the institution, but its operations in the various departments—duties, which his love of systems and order, his extensive knowledge, and his practical skill in mechanics, eminently qualified him to perform with peculiar correctness.”
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Here, Rittenhouse was following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, who was made warden of Britain's Royal Mint in 1696, in recognition of his own great scientific achievements. Yet, Rittenhouse never deviated from his true vocation, the practice of mechanics. Where Newton was ultimately a mathematician, Franklin, Rittenhouse, Jefferson, and the other American virtuosi were decidedly engineers, content to find workable solutions to specific problems and leave theoretical nicety, and even mathematical exactitude, to others.

Rittenhouse's published study of the workings of the pendulum, undertaken at Jefferson's request as part of an effort to create the world's first metric system, exhibits throughout the sensibilities of the mechanic, rather than those of the formally trained scientist or mathematician.
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“His mathematical paper revealed the manner in which practical clock construction, physics, and mathematics were related in his life,” writes his modern biographer, of the work on the pendulum. “He remained a mechanic to whom practice was the only consideration in certain projects.”
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Rittenhouse ended his tenure at the Mint on the grounds of poor health in June 1795 and died one year later.

Summing up his life before an audience that included President Washington, the Congress, state officials, foreign dignitaries, and the membership of the American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Rush publically enshrined Rittenhouse as a natural genius for the new American epoch: self-taught, yet able to rival the greatest mathematical minds of the Old World; heroic to the point of sacrificing his fragile health for his useful endeavors; republican from birth; and sensate to the “natural connection between a knowledge of the works of nature and just ideas of the divine perfections.”
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Most important of all, Rush informed the assembled mourners packed into Philadelphia's sumptuous new First Presbyterian Church, Rittenhouse remained untainted by the institutional remnants of an educational system “adopted in Europe in the sixteenth century” that would only have quashed his spirit and extinguished his innately
American
talents. As a result, the self-taught Rittenhouse, who had once solved mathematical problems in his head while plowing the family fields, was free to pursue useful knowledge wherever it took him, to the true benefit of society.

“I am disposed to believe that his extensive knowledge and splendid character are to be ascribed chiefly to his having escaped the pernicious influence of monkish learning upon his mind in early life,” said Rush, by now a well-established, if caustic, campaigner against classical instruction in the schools. Otherwise, “Rittenhouse the philosopher, one of the luminaries of the eighteenth century, might have spent his hours of study in composing syllogism, or in measuring the feet of Greek and Latin poetry.”
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Traditional assessments tend to view America's technological triumphs as the natural, logical outgrowth of the nation's political system and its dedication to free enterprise. Popular icons invoked in support of this notion invariably include the lone inventors, the industrial systematizers, and the ingenious marketers whose technological prowess has been confirmed by great commercial success and accompanying celebrity—the Wrights, Edison, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, among many others. This is, however, to look at the problem backward, to write a history of the present.

In fact, the colonial movement for useful knowledge, dating back at least to the Junto of the late 1720s, preceded and then made possible the Revolution and the subsequent rise of America's characteristic political and economic systems. This movement, which produced such figures as Ebenezer Kinnersley, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, and of course Franklin, firmly embedded the values of the mechanic, the artisan, the engineer, and the inventor in American society. In their hands, earlier European notions of practical learning and the idea of science took on a revolutionary cast, one that anticipated the coming political resistance against the British.

Long before the Boston Tea Party or other overt acts of defiance to imperial rule, the leather aprons and the institutions they introduced or adopted successfully challenged the social, political, and intellectual order of the day. The accompanying knowledge revolution, epitomized by Franklin and his fellow Philadelphia electricians in the 1740s and early 1750s, freed the colonists of constraints imported and imposed from Europe and laid the necessary groundwork for American independence.

In the ensuing decades, proponents of this movement, notably the mechanics and craftsmen in the colonial urban centers, steadily enhanced their political influence and economic well-being through the creation of subscription libraries, lecture and study circles, voluntary fire brigades, cooperative insurance
schemes, and local militias. Improvements in printing technology and communications—Franklin was, after all, a successful publisher, an innovative postmaster, and a master intellectual networker—spread their ideas far and wide.

The close affinities between the leading lights of the colonial movement for useful knowledge and the revolutionary generation of American political leaders ensured that the values and attitudes of the knowledge societies would be institutionalized in the new republic. The two groups often overlapped directly, sometimes at the very highest level: Franklin served for three years as Pennsylvania's chief executive; Jefferson headed the American Philosophical Society for eighteen years; and John Adams directed Boston's American Academy of Arts and Sciences for more than two decades. Washington and Hamilton stand out among the Philosophical Society's many politically prominent members of the period.

These figures, their colleagues, and associates all placed a premium on the utility of knowledge and tended to value the inventor, the experimenter, and the mechanic over the theoretician, the metaphysician, or other learned authority. Once in power, they wasted little time enshrining this notion and rewarding its practitioners under American law. Article One of the U.S. Constitution explicitly calls on Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Among the earliest items to come before America's new legislative body were the granting of patents and the issuing of copyrights, areas where the influence of Tench Coxe's ideas was considerable.
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Washington's so-called Farewell Address, delivered in 1796, linked the diffusion of knowledge to the long-term survival of American democracy.

In a sure sign of the intellectual and economic ferment at work, knowledge associations, in emulation of the American Philosophical Society, proliferated throughout the period, from New England south to New Orleans and westward to Cincinnati, Nashville, and St. Louis. Each society was at the outset local in nature, designed to allow for the personal exchange of ideas and shared interests that still characterized the practice of Enlightenment science. In general, they were open to different walks of life and less reliant than their European counterparts on the social or economic elite. This ensured an approach to knowledge that appealed equally to the farmer, the artisan, the merchant, or the “curious” gentleman.
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Over time, a degree of specialization began to appear within the broader movement for useful knowledge. At first, this mostly took the form of small,
localized professional associations, for example uniting physicians in Boston or Philadelphia. More significant was the branching out of the knowledge societies to address agricultural improvement, the development of manufactures, or other specific questions in applied science. They frequently offered prizes or cash premiums for solutions to problems in industry or farming, encouraged the exchange of information and ideas among members and with other, like-minded associations, and increasingly distributed public funds in support of these efforts.

Franklin's Society for Political Inquiries served as an effective incubator for both the industrial vision of Tench Coxe and the ideal of practical education championed by Benjamin Rush. There were even societies devoted to specific technological challenges. The Rumsean Society, created by Franklin in 1787, was formed to support the work of steamboat designer James Rumsey, who carried on a seemingly endless patent fight with rival inventor John Fitch that also drew in Jefferson, Rush, Washington, and other leading political and scientific figures. Other groups included the Society for the Improvement of Inland Navigation, in Philadelphia, and the Boston Mechanic Association, one of the first societies to address the interests of artisans and engineers alike.
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Among the most important were the manufacturing associations, which united the aspirations of the mechanics with broader notions of economic development, political independence, and patriotism. New organizations such as Philadelphia's Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts and New York's Society for the Promotion of the Useful Arts drew on the older, general-knowledge societies for members. Like their predecessors, they attracted a diverse range of skills, occupations, and social groups: craftsmen, merchants and financiers, accountants, lawyers, instrument makers, and the slowly growing pool of academic scientists.
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So powerful was the promise of the movement for useful knowledge that there was little real chance of slowing or deflecting America's coming technological and industrial revolution, despite deep divisions among the Founding Fathers—and in society at large—over the future place of manufactures. Just as colonial notions of practical utility anticipated the final break with Great Britain, so, too, did these ideas operate largely outside the control of the postwar political factions.

Alexander Hamilton's blueprint for a manufacturing utopia collapsed under the weight of unsavory dealings, managerial malfeasance, and technical
incompetence. Nonetheless, his Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures ultimately produced the industrial colossus that once was Paterson, New Jersey. Jefferson, meanwhile, found that imagining a republican idyll was one thing but realizing such a state in a world of international trade, diplomacy, and war was quite another. To protect itself, the young republic would have to turn away, at least in part, from its agricultural vocation. “Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise,” Jefferson conceded to a friend during the War of 1812 against the British. “From a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.”
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Having escaped the dangerous terrain of his youthful “metaphysical Reasonings,” Benjamin Franklin never looked back. His faith in the pursuit of useful knowledge—and in the social networks that made that pursuit possible—survived the setbacks, professional rivalries, and political upheavals that punctuated his long and eventful life. Not even rebellion against the British could shake the intellectual ties that Franklin had carefully cultivated ever since his early days in the coffeehouses, taverns, and salons of London.

With the end of the war, he sought where possible to resume his scientific correspondence with former friends and associates in the Royal Society. While he could not resist chiding the British for not “spending those Millions in doing Good which in the last War have been spent in doing Mischief,” Franklin nonetheless struck clear notes of optimism and even wonder as he looked toward a world of scientific advances and technological change that he could never hope to see.

“The rapid Progress
true
Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon,” wrote Franklin ten years before his death. “It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor & double its Produce.”
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Franklin was prescient in his predictions, if not in the timing. Had he somehow managed to live just another century, he would certainly have been among the early adopters of new technologies. One can readily imagine a joyful Franklin reveling in train travel, or behind the wheel of an early automobile.

Already, the lighter-than-air balloon, or aerostat, had become the latest vogue in France, and it fired Franklin's imagination to think of possible uses.
“This Experiment is by no means a trifling one,” he reported to Joseph Banks, head of the Royal Society, whom he strongly encouraged to pursue similar experiments. “It may be attended with important Consequences that no one can foresee.”
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Yet, the overall direction of America's scientific and technological development would not have come as a surprise.