Investor's Business Daily, August 8th, 2007
Self-taught astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker wanted one thing: to be the best. The trick was getting others to let him try.
Banneker (1731-1806), a black American, was born near Baltimore. Though a free man and a brilliant one, he had to overcome racial barriers to reach success. Once he did, he fearlessly spoke his mind.
Banneker is perhaps best known for the work he did helping plan Washington, D.C. He took on some of the most technical surveying tasks needed to lay out the city. It was a rare kind of job for a black person to be given at the time.
Though Banneker took his place in history for that role, his other achievements outshine it.
He was a self-starter who read books to teach himself calculus and other mathematics, as well as astronomy. Eventually Banneker used his skills to publish an almanac that farmers could rely on.
Banneker drew on his powers of observation, and thought he could grasp anything he examined.
One discovery drew author Charles Cerami to write the biography "Benjamin Banneker: Surveyor, Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot." Banneker's work in astronomy led him to posit that stars beyond our sun had their own orbiting planets.
"He had actually written in his own hand things about the extra-solar planets we now talk about routinely," said Cerami. Their existence was verified only recently, "but he wrote about them in 1790."
One person had tried to show planets existed beyond our solar system, Cerami says. "It was Giordano Bruno, the monk in Rome burned at the stake for mentioning this."
Banneker's name, Cerami says, belongs alongside those of Copernicus and Galileo.
But Banneker led a low-profile life. His father was a freed slave, his mother the daughter of an English servant. Banneker was born free.
"That was relatively unusual, because most blacks at that time were slaves," said James Horton. He's the Benjamin Banneker professor of American Civilization at George Washington University.
"He was an extraordinary kid," Horton said. "He grew up as a farmer who grew tobacco and did all this math on the side." Banneker, who had three sisters, lived in a modest log cabin built by his father.
"From childhood he was always learning something new every day by comparing how things worked," Cerami said. But Banneker got less than a year of formal education at a Quaker schoolhouse.
"He was largely self-taught; he taught himself math," said Nancy Witherell, a historian with the National Capital Planning Commission. "He had enough ambition that he published his own almanac. That's quite remarkable."
Banneker was fearlessly inquisitive -- and practical. As a youngster, he saw a watch and grew fascinated. With the owner's permission, he took it apart to study. Then he built a working clock made from wood based on the design.
"There had only been two all-wooden clocks, as far as anybody knows, anywhere in the world," said Cerami.
Banneker met setbacks head-on and turned them into opportunities.
"In his late 50s he got rheumatism and had to stop farming," said Horton, who discusses Banneker in his book "Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America." "(So) he took advantage of the time he had now to really focus on astronomy and mathematics. He developed all kinds of theories and math constructs about movements of planets and stars."
Banneker's passion for and abilities in this kind of work led Andrew Ellicott to request his help. Ellicott needed to survey the "federal territory," the site for the city of Washington. It was to be a grand capital for the new nation.
In a letter dated Sept. 11, 1789, designer Pierre Charles L'Enfant wrote to George Washington: "No nation, perhaps, had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their capital city should be fixed."
"Ellicott needed somebody to do fairly complicated math computations and couldn't find anybody to do it, so he called on this black guy," said Horton.
In the early 1790s, after finishing his surveying tasks, Banneker set out to publish his almanac. It was based on a detailed chart of the position of the stars.
Banneker sent a copy of his almanac to Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state. Though a proponent of freedom, Jefferson owned slaves. Banneker decided to call him on the apparent double standard.
"Jefferson had said he suspected black people were inferior to white people -- they couldn't write a coherent sentence or write a play or do anything mathematical," said Horton. Banneker's almanac refuted the idea, and he had a bone to pick.
Of his almanac work, Banneker wrote: "Having long had unbounded desires to become acquainted with the secrets of nature, I have had to gratify my curiosity herein. ... I need not recount to you the many difficulties and disadvantages which I have had to encounter."
Impressed, Jefferson forwarded the almanac to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. In a letter back to Banneker, he wrote: "I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them."
This story originally ran April 22, 2002, on Leaders & Success.
