Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker was born free in Baltimore County, Maryland, on the ninth of November 1731, the son of a freed African-born father and a free Black mother. He was self-taught in mathematics and astronomy after a Quaker neighbor lent him books in his late teens.

At twenty-one he built a fully functioning wooden striking clock — by all surviving accounts the first clock made in the American colonies — from a borrowed pocket watch he had taken apart to study the mechanism. The clock kept time accurately for more than fifty years.

In 1791 the surveyor Andrew Ellicott hired Banneker — then sixty — onto the federal survey team commissioned by George Washington to lay out the boundaries of the District of Columbia. Banneker computed the astronomical observations and performed the trigonometric calculations that fixed the corner markers of the new federal district. He was the first African American to hold a federal-government appointment.

From 1792 through 1797 he published the annual Banneker's Almanac, with astronomical computations, tide tables, and meteorological data he calculated himself. The almanacs were widely read in the United States, in Britain, and in France. In August 1791 he sent a manuscript copy of his almanac to Thomas Jefferson with a personal letter challenging Jefferson's published claim, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that Black people possessed inferior intellectual capacity. Jefferson's reply — confirming receipt of the almanac, professing himself "ardent to see a good system commenced for raising the condition of the body and mind to what it ought to be" — was published in Banneker's 1793 almanac.

He died at his Baltimore County farm on the ninth of October 1806, one month short of seventy-five.

He is honored here as the surveyor whose calculations fixed the corners of the United States capital.