Rittenhouse, David.—The first noted American scientist, born of a poor Pennsylvania German, son of a farmer, at Germantown, April8, 1732. Owing to a feeble constitution was apprenticed to a clock and mechanical instrument-maker, where he followed the bent of his mechanical and mathematical genius, though too poor to keep informed concerning the progress of science in Europe. While Newton and Leibnitz were warmly disputing the honor of first discoverer of Fluxion, writes Lossing, Rittenhouse, entirely ignorant of what they had done, became the inventor of that remarkable feature of algebraical analysis. Applying the knowledge which he derived from study and reflection to the mechanic arts, he produced a planetarium, or an exhibition of the movements of the solar system by machinery. That work of art is in possession of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. It gave him a great reputation, and in1770 he went to Philadelphia, where he met members of the Philosophical Society to whom he had two years before communicated that he had calculated with great exactitude the transit of Venus which occurred June3, 1769. Rittenhouse was one of those whom the society appointed to observe it. Only three times before, in the whole range of human observation, had mortal vision beheld the orb of Venus pass across the disc of the sun. Upon the exactitude of the performance according to calculations depended many astronomical problems, and the hour was looked forward to by philosophers with intense interest. As the moment approached, according to his calculations, Rittenhouse became greatly excited. When the discs of the planets touched at the expected moment the philosopher fainted. His highest hopes were realized and on November9th following he was blessed with a sight of the transit of Mercury. When Benjamin Franklin died Rittenhouse was appointed president of the American Philosophical Society to fill his place. His fame now was world wide and many official honors awaited his acceptance. He held the office of treasurer of Pennsylvania for many years, and in1792 he was appointed director of the Mint. Died 1797, aged64.

Of the origin of the first great American scientist we get an interesting amount of data from the pages of Pennypacker’s “The Settlement of Germantown, Pa., and the Beginning of German Emigration to North America.” According to this authority, his ancestor, William Rittenhouse (Rittinghausen), was born in the year 1664, in the principality of Broich, near the city of Muhlheim on the Ruhr, where his brother Heinrich Nicholaus, and his mother, Maria Hagerhoffs, were living in1678. At this time he was a resident of Amsterdam. We are told that his ancestors had long been manufacturers of paper at Arnheim. However this may be, it is certain that this was the business to which he was trained, because when he took the oath of citizenship in Amsterdam, June23, 1678, he was described as a paper maker from Muhlheim.

He emigrated to New York, but since there was no printing in that city, and no opportunity, therefore, for carrying on his business of making paper, in1688, together with his sons, Gerhard and Klaus, and his daughter Elizabeth, who subsequently married Heivert Papen, he came to Germantown. There, in 1690, upon a little stream flowing into the Wissahickon, he erected the first paper mill in America, an event which must ever preserve his memory in the recollection of men. “He was the founder of a family which in the person of David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, philosopher and statesman, reached the very highest intellectual rank.”