Nathaniel Bowditch

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Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838, last and unfinished painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1828) .jpg

Nathaniel Bowditch (born March 26, 1773 in Salem , Massachusetts , † March 16, 1838 in Boston ) was a self-taught mathematician, astronomer and physicist, by profession navigator and insurance clerk. Bowditch wrote around thirty works, in particular an English translation and adaptation of Pierre-Simon Laplace's Celestial Mechanics and the American Practical Navigator , which is still a standard nautical work today.

Life

Nathaniel was the fourth of seven children of Habakkuk Bowditch and Mary, b. Ingersoll. He grew up in poor conditions. At the age of ten he had to leave school and help out his father, who originally Cooper was during the War of Independence hired as skipper, but then again his former profession had accepted but whose business was destroyed soon. From 1785 Nathaniel was an office apprentice at a ship chandler.

In 1787 he began to study mathematics as an autodidact and soon came to differential and integral calculus . After he had also taught himself Latin , he was able to study Isaac Newton's Principia from 1791 . Later he also learned about a dozen languages ​​on his own, from 1792 mainly French.

It is worth mentioning the circumstances under which the adolescent came to the valuable books: During the War of Independence, a pirate from the vicinity of Salem had made a prize that contained books with which the library of the Irish Royal Society , which was to be founded , was to be built. Salem merchants had acquired the best library in the New World north of Philadelphia with the prize . The advocacy of two ministers gave the strikingly gifted access.

In 1795 he began his first voyage in the East India trade. On the way he found the time to study the English standard work Practical Navigator by John Hamilton Moore , in which he ultimately corrected more than 8,000 errors and which he edited in 1799 in a revised version. In 1802 the New American Practical Navigator appeared for the first time on the basis of this arrangement , and in the same year Bowditch also became the commandant of the three-master Putnam , in which he himself was financially involved.

1802-03 he read the first volume of Laplaces Traité de Mécanique Céleste , which had appeared in 1798, until 1806 three more (the fifth volume appeared in 1825). After he had brought the Putnam safely back to the port of Salem on Christmas Day 1803 in unsightly weather, while all the other captains were lounging off the coast, his fame as a practical navigator was final.

Bowditch withdrew from the seafaring and became president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance in Salem (1804-1823). Mathematical and astronomical research, which he carried out on the side, gave him academic reputation.

He turned down offers from Harvard University , West Point and the University of Virginia . On the one hand, his income as the president of an insurance company was around half that of a university professor; on the other hand, it is not known that he has ever spoken to a larger group.

When he became president of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company in 1823 and moved to Boston, he had 2,500 books, around 100 maps and 29 volumes of his own manuscripts with him. The economic improvement brought about by the new post allowed him to deduct the $ 12,000 printing cost for the editing of Laplace, which appeared in 1829, 1832, 1834 and 1839, Volume IV posthumously. He had invested a total of $ 20,000 out of pocket to bring this work to the English-speaking world.

Nathaniel Bowditch died in Boston in 1838 and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts . The American Practical Navigator , which he himself updated until the end of his life, was maintained from the 11th to the 35th edition, 1867, by his son Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch . In 1868 the United States Navy's Hydrographic Office bought the copyright. The continuously adapted book is still a standard work today.

The Bowditch is named after him , a lunar crater 40 km in diameter, which lies at 25 ° S, 103 ° E on the edge of the moon. The Bowditch Crests , cliffs in Antarctica, also bear his name. The house he lived in Salem, Massachusetts from 1811 to 1823 has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark since 1965 under the name Nathaniel Bowditch House .

family

His son Henry Ingersoll Bowditch was a noted doctor and abolitionist . Among his grandchildren are Henry Pickering Bowditch and Charles Pickering Bowditch .

Membership in scientific societies

Works

  • From 1799 contributions to the Practical Navigator (especially a chapter on the subject of length determination from lunar distances ), from the third edition (1802) in fact author of the New American Practical Navigator , until today a standard work of nautical science written in simple language. Bowditch's simplified method of determining geographical longitude using lunar distances, which even nautical experts without a university degree could achieve, was listed in the American Practical Navigator until 1914.
  • 1804 article on moon observations
  • 1805–1806 nautical charts; Port maps of Salem, Beverly, Marblehead and Manchester
  • 1807 article about a meteor explosion
  • 1815 Article about the later so-called Lissajous figures
  • 1815, 1818 and 1820 articles on comet orbits
  • from 1829: Marquis de LaPlace, Celestial mechanics: Translated from the French, with a commentary, by Nathaniel Bowditch Vols. I – IV (Bronx, NY, 1966).

literature

  • Alfred Boller Stanford: Navigator. The story of Nathaniel Bowditch ; William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1927. 308 pp .; Dent, London 1928

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Bowditch, Nathaniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Navigator, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, insurance clerk
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1773
PLACE OF BIRTH Salem, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1838
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts