David Rittenhouse, Pennsylvania |April 1792 - June 1795

David Rittenhouse was born the son of farmer Matthias Rittenhouse in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He married Eleanor Coulston, and then after her death, Hannah Jacobs. He became an astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker and one of the leading American scientists of the eighteenth century, second only to Benjamin Franklin.

Self-taught, he early showed mathematical and mechanical ability, and mastered Newton’s Principia in an English translation. As a young boy Rittenhouse constructed a model of a watermill, and by the age of seventeen he had built a wooden clock, but having little opportunity to attend school, he largely educated himself from books and a box of tools inherited from his uncle David Williams, a furniture maker. At the age of nineteen he began making clocks and other mechanical and scientific devices.

Over the next thirty or forty years he made many highly-prized and innovative mathematical and astronomical instruments, most famous of which were two orreries he constructed for the Colleges of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). These orreries show the solar and lunar eclipses and other phenomena for a period of 5,000 years either forward or backward. After moving to Philadelphia in 1770, Rittenhouse used both astronomical and terrestrial observations to survey canals and rivers and to establish the boundaries between many of the Mid-Atlantic States. He held the post of city surveyor of Philadelphia in 1774. (more…)

Republished from The E-Gobrecht - the Electronic Publication of the Liberty Seated Collector Club

Part 1-The Hiring of Christian Gobrecht

During a recent research trip to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, my research partner, Joel Orosz, had the excellent idea to call for the Robert M. Patterson personal papers. Three letters from Samuel Moore to Robert M. Patterson dated June, 1835 were located. At this time Moore was the outgoing director of the mint; Patterson assumed the Mint directorship in July, 1835. Patterson’s father had also been the Mint director, serving from 1806 to 1824. Tying the family knot even further, the incoming director Robert M. Patterson was the brother-in-law of the outgoing director Moore.

The first letter is dated June 16, 1835 and deals with the issue of hiring Christian Gobrecht as an engraver. Moore wrote to the Secretary of the Treasurer, Levi Woodbury, on the same day regarding the same issue. The Moore/Woodbury letter is largely reprinted in Breen’s Secret History of the Gobrecht Coinages. Between the two letters, it is clear that the outgoing director Samuel Moore dearly wanted to get Gobrecht hired into the Mint, which indeed occurred later in 1835. The first Moore/Patterson letter reads as follows (the second and third letters will follow in a subsequent edition of the E-Gobrecht). (more…)