David Rittenhouse

His physician, Robley Douglinson, in episode 17.

David Rittenhouse was in All Bones Considered, Laurel Hill Stories, number 52.

This month, like I say, one of the weak connections is General Hugh Mercer, M.D., Scottish immigrant, personal friend of Washington, killed at the Battle of Princeton only days after the Christmas crossing of the Delaware River.

Another weak connection, although stronger, is Ferdinand Hassler, the man Jefferson hired to map the continental coast and who created the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He inherited a long European tradition and brought its exacting habits to an American coast that was still mapped in disconnected pieces.

That connection between earth and sky had already drawn Philadelphia into an international scientific enterprise.

1769, the year before Hassler was born, David Rittenhouse and his fellow observers at Norriton watched Venus cross the face of the sun.

See All Bones Considered, Laurel Hill Stories, 52 for more on the transit of Venus.

his eyesight genuinely failing after years of reading paperwork by candlelight in field tents.

He'd recently ordered a new pair of eyeglasses from a Philadelphia optician named David Rittenhouse, having been forced to borrow spectacles from other officers for years before that.

This detail matters because what's about to happen in that room isn't some calculated piece of theater dreamed up on the spot.

It's a genuinely exhausted, genuinely aging man walking into a room of furious subordinates, carrying real physical evidence of exactly how much this war had already cost him personally.

astronomy

first observatory put up by ephraim williams welsh many of our early day almanacs based on astronomical studies and computations of david rittenhouse german welsh lick observatory california and yerkes observatory wisconsin founded by james lick and charles yerkes germans For pictures of many of the stars, Dorothy Klumpke, German, achieved much fame.

Famous mathematician and everyday almanac maker was Benjamin Banneker, Negro, who also helped L'Enfant, French, to lay out Washington, D.C. Chemistry Ephedrine, drug used as base for cold remedies, discovered by K.K. Chen, Chinese.

adrenaline and diastase discovered by jokichi takamine japanese grape sugar changed into tartaric acid by musheg vagoni armenian george washington carver negro made one hundred forty five products from peanut one hundred products from sweet potato and sixty products from the pecan fermented milk product of high curative values discovered by H. M. Dodurian, Armenian.

Um, so, so we've got a few Founding Fathers.

We've got David Rittenhouse, the, the first director of the US Mint.

Um, we got Thomas Godfrey, the guy who invented the, the quadrant, which later became the sextant.

S- uh, Jonathan Miller, the first director of, um, the Unis- US Military Academy.