The Society for Useful Knowledge (21 page)

“The human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge, and the things connected with it,” argued Paine in
The Age of Reason
, citing the inclination of even the youngest child to build toy bridges, play with paper boats, dam gutters, and otherwise imitate “the works of man.” Only with the introduction of traditional schooling is such worthy behavior on the part of the child extinguished. “It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist.”
⁶²

Rush, who had first proposed the title
Common Sense
and helped Paine find a publisher for the seminal tract and then edited much of the text, further underscored the vital relationship between the new nation and a new system of education: “I consider it possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done, if we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” He then went on to outline the ideal republican curriculum in an essay whose title sums up his heartfelt support for practical education: “Observations upon the Study of the Latin and Greek Languages, as a Branch of Liberal Education, with Hints of a Plan of Liberal Instruction, without Them, Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners and Government in the United States.”

In short, the new country simply did not have time to waste and had to dedicate itself to the pursuit of science and other useful knowledge. “Here the opportunities of acquiring knowledge and advancing private and public
interest are so numerous, and the rewards of genius and industry so certain, that not a particle of time should be misspent or lost.… To spend four or five years learning two dead languages is to turn our backs on a goldmine in order to amuse ourselves catching butterflies.”
⁶³

a
This was the same year in which he cooperated with John Bartram to publish their proposal for a learned association, the future American Philosophical Society. In his memoirs, Franklin says he set aside his initial education plan for several years after his first choice to run the school declined to take the post.
ABF
, 182.

b
Princeton received its charter in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. It was formally renamed Princeton in 1896, in honor of its host community, Princeton, New Jersey. Columbia was originally chartered in 1754 as King's College. It reopened in 1784, after the disruption of the Revolution, as Columbia University.

c
Earlier, Franklin had taken on the Philadelphia's Presbyterian establishment in defense of another outspoken cleric, Samuel Hemphill, whose sermons “inculcated strongly the Practice of Virtue” at the expense of orthodox dogma. Franklin lost that battle and he retreated more or less permanently from church life after that.
ABF
, 167.

d
In fact, the associated trust stated explicitly that the building was restricted to the use of orthodox Christian preachers. See Cheyney, 24, n1.

e
Paine was not above invoking classical references in the adoption of his various pen names, such as Atlanticus, Humanus, or Vox Populi, but he otherwise broke with tradition and never relied on epigraphs or literary quotations in support of his arguments. See Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Classics,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
1 (4): 371, 378.

A growing taste for useful knowledge is an important characteristic of the people of this new world.
—Rev. David M'Clure

Franklin's foreign missions deprived America of its most visible advocate of useful knowledge for years at a time. Yet, the same social, economic, and political developments that accompanied the colonies' slow march toward independence worked in favor of the gradual resuscitation of his American Philosophical Society, as well as the formation of other organizations around the colonies to encourage scientific experimentation, practical learning, and innovation.

Just as the laws and practices of the new republic that emerged began to reflect profound American distrust of centralized power, intellectual elites, state-sponsored religion, and authoritarian institutions in general, so, too, did revolutionary-era science and technology begin to take an American turn. Here, New World belief in usefulness—to man, to society, to the newly independent states now freed from empire's heavy hand but also stripped of many of its advantages—trumped notions of theoretical purity and mathematical exactitude.

Shortly before the Revolution, one hundred of Virginia's leading figures created a knowledge association modeled directly along the lines of the societies taking shape in Philadelphia. Known as the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, its members included future presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as the prominent patriots George Mason and Arthur Lee. A philosophical society formed in 1774 in Charleston, South Carolina, garnered a flurry of international fame for its study of electric eels, a follow-on to Franklin's work with lightning and other aspects of electrical fire.

The immediate postwar years saw a proliferation of societies dedicated to useful knowledge, from the Philosophical Library in Salem, Massachusetts—whose collection began with the wartime seizure of learned books and papers on board a British merchant ship—to the Mississippi Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Useful Knowledge.
¹
But before such organizations could take firm root in American soil, they would have to overcome their relative isolation and develop the collective enterprise of Enlightenment science in ways that could meet the high standards set by the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, and the other European associations. This meant mastering the techniques and idioms of experimental science before it could be turned in new directions befitting a new society.

The opportunity for America's would-be virtuosi to make their grand entrance into the world of Western science came, quite literally, from the heavens. England's Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, of comet fame, died in 1742, one year before Franklin circulated his initial call for a colonial philosophical society, but Halley's appeal to posterity that “the curious strenuously … apply themselves” to observing a pair of celestial phenomena in June 1761, and again eight years later, did not go unheeded.
²
The astronomer's vision sparked an unprecedented global effort and helped goad America's nascent scientific community, then plagued by a general lack of purpose and personal squabbles, into its first significant collective action.

At stake, Halley pointed out to the Royal Society, was “the certain and adequate solution of the noblest, and otherwise most difficult problem” in astronomy, namely determining the absolute size of the visible universe.
³
Until the twentieth century, astronomers lacked sophisticated tools that could measure directly the distance between earth and the other planets. Instead, they generally were restricted to a system of angular measurements and relative distances that described any one of the celestial bodies only in terms of the others.

Over the centuries, the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, and the great medieval Muslim astronomers, among others, made ingenious attempts to measure the actual distance between celestial bodies, say from the earth to the sun; if this could be established, then all the other dimensions of the visible universe would fall neatly into place. Lacking this vital piece of information, the Newtonian revolution that had so excited the scientific and popular imagination at the beginning of the eighteenth century remained essentially unfinished.

Here was Halley's “noblest” of all problems, one whose best chance of solution, he suggested, lay with the recurrent astronomical phenomenon known as the transit of Venus, a partial eclipse of the sun by the intervening planet. Viewed from earth, Venus would appear as a small black disk sliding across the face of the sun, a phenomenon that would allow astronomers in distant locations to time its progress and then compare their findings. Discrepancies in the observed time of the transit, due to the apparent displacement of the sun when viewed from different points on earth—the so-called solar parallax—would in theory allow relatively accurate determination of the earth's distance from the sun.

The entire process, Halley assured his readers with startling understatement, would be easy. “From these differences, duly observed, the sun's parallax may be determined, even to a small part of a second of time, and that without any other instruments than telescopes and good common clocks, and without any other qualifications in the observer than fidelity and diligence, with a little skill in astronomy.”
⁴
His proposed solution, much of it lifted from the Scottish mathematician James Gregory, had one other vital requirement—patience. Transits of Venus are predictable but rare events, generally occurring in eight-year pairs separated by intervals of more than a century. If the “curious” missed the next cycle in 1761 and 1769, their successors would have to wait until 1874 for another chance.
^a

As a result, preparations got under way in the scientific capitals of Europe years in advance. Expeditions were carefully planned to far-off lands, where the first of the two transits would be most visible. Halley's method, meanwhile, was refined considerably, in particular by the Frenchman Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, onetime astronomer to the Russian tsars. Delisle realized that the same result could be achieved by the simpler method of recording from different locales the exact time the transit either began or ended. This offered some protection against bad weather obscuring the entire event, and it opened up a much wider range of potential observation points by including those many portions of the globe where the sun would not be visible throughout the full transit.
⁵

Interest in the British colonies was first piqued almost nine years in advance, after a letter from Delisle with instructions to a colleague in French-controlled
Quebec about an imminent transit of the planet Mercury fell into American hands in late 1752. This was essentially a dry run for the later observation of Venus, and a rough translation alerted Franklin and Colden, among a handful of others, to the importance of the upcoming event. Franklin, ever attuned to the growing American thirst for scientific findings, duly informed the readers of his
Poor Richard Improved
: “In the Year 1761, the Distance of all the Planets from the Sun will be determined to a great Degree of Exactness by Observations on a Transit of the Planet
Venus
over the Face of the Sun.”
⁶

The pending arrival of the 1761 transit sparked a concerted international effort. Scientific societies and interested governments across Europe dispatched dozens of observation teams, from the Indian Ocean to Siberia to the coast of Newfoundland, the only place in North America that both offered a clear view and was relatively accessible from existing settlements. Countless others were set up by interested members of the public, their imaginations fired by the Enlightenment vogue for experiential science.

The state of war between Europe's leading scientific powers—Britain and France—hindered a number of these expeditions, while the unanticipated difficulty of determining the transit's precise beginning, or point of contact with the sun, further complicated matters. Particularly vexing to eighteenth-century observers was the so-called black drop effect, an optical illusion that distorted Venus's round shape at the precise moment that it crossed the outlines of the sun. This made consistent and accurate measurement of the transit's duration almost impossible.

Moreover, the preferred method of recording either the beginning or the end of the transit required knowledge of the observer's exact location, something that still eluded contemporary science. Even the geographical coordinates of such established astronomical centers as Paris and Greenwich, England, remained imprecise. Bad weather in a number of important locales further undermined the success of the project.

Harvard mathematics professor John Winthrop, great-great-grandson of the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, set off on a mission to Newfoundland aboard the provincial sloop
Boston
after the governor invoked the utilitarian prospects, as well as local prestige, in his appeal for financial support from the legislature. “You must know that this Phenomenon, (which has been observed but once before since the Creation of the World) will, in all Probability, settle some Questions in Astronomy which may ultimately be very serviceable to
Navigation.… We shall hereby serve the Cause of Science, and do Credit to the Province.”
⁷

Winthrop and his team, including two of his best students, endured “the infinite swarms of insects” that sought in vain to drive them from their hilltop encampment. Unlike some of the other observers, the Americans—armed with a telescope from Harvard and “an excellent pendulum Clock”—enjoyed fine weather for astronomical observation. “The morning of the 6
^th
of June was serene and calm,” Winthrop recorded in his account of the expedition.
⁸
His findings later proved to have been among the more accurate of any of the worldwide observations, coming in just about 6 percent short of today's accepted figure.
^b
However, measurements from the different global teams varied so widely as to make the collated data essentially unusable. The virtuosi would have to do better in 1769.

Prospects for success during the second of the two eighteenth-century transits were greatly enhanced by the fact that it would be far more visible in both Europe and North America than the first one had been. That this second transit was just eight years away certainly helped as well, something the Royal Society noted with palpable relief: “In this uncertainty, the astronomers of the present age are peculiarly fortunate in being able so soon to have recourse to another transit of Venus in 1769.”
⁹
Technology and methods of measurement had also improved considerably in the intervening years, feeding hopes that this time the virtuosi would be able to inform the world of the true size of the universe.