Nathaniel bowditch book

Nathaniel bowditch family tree
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Nathaniel bowditch schooner

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Biography

Nathaniel Bowditch's father was Habakkuk Bowditch who was a cooper, that is a maker and repairer of wooden casks. His mother was Mary Ingersoll. Although Nathaniel was born in Salem, Massachusetts, his family moved to Danvers, also in Massachusetts, while he was still a baby. After a few years, when Nathaniel was seven years old, they returned to Salem. As Albree writes in [8]:-

The first 50 years of Bowditch's life revolved around Salem, Massachusetts, a compact seafaring town along the picturesque north shore, 16 miles north of Boston.

This was a hard time for the Bowditch family. Habakkuk Bowditch's business collapsed and the family hit really hard times financially. Although Nathaniel went to school until he was ten years old, his formal education had to end at that point and he began working in his father's cooperage shop. After two years of helping his father, Nathaniel became an apprentice clerk in the ship's chandler shop of Hodges and Ropes in Salem in 1785. This shop dealt in provisions and supplies for ships. In 1790 Bowditch, aged seventeen by this time,

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Nathaniel Bowditch, Navigator

Navigator, mathematician, astronomer, clerk, insurance company executive, accountant—Nathaniel Bowditch
was all these things. He grew up in the late 1700s in Salem, Massachusetts, which was then an active seaport, where most everyone in town had something to do with ships and the sea. Like many boys in 18th-century America, Nathaniel Bowditch left school as a boy to apprentice to a skilled tradesman.

Nathaniel Bowditch was a perfectionist, which is a good trait for a navigator. When the tools he had at hand, either reference books or nautical instruments, were not up to par, he didn’t make excuses—he would just create new ones himself. The quadrant seen here was one he built himself. The octant (below) was another one of his personal instruments. You can see both of these items on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

Apprentices worked for free in exchange for being trained in a trade or business. His apprenticeship began when he was twelve years old, when he went to learn bookkeeping from a local ship chandler (someone who sells ship s

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Nathaniel Bowditch

In 1816, Harvard awarded Nathaniel Bowditch an honorary doctor of laws, a decade after its (unsuccessful) offer of the Hollis professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy. These were remarkable moves, considering that Bowditch was entirely self-taught. But Bowditch was no less remarkable. He was the country’s most accomplished mathematician, the man Thomas Jefferson called “a meteor of the hemisphere.” Though remembered now largely for his New American Practical Navigator (1802), the ubiquitous guide for nineteenth-century mariners, he took much greater pride in his annotated translation of that apotheosis of Enlightenment quantitative sciences, Pierre de Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste.

So did his countrymen. For a young nation anxious to prove to Europe that it was not a cultural desert, this accomplishment would “be something to boast of,” wrote Harvard professor Edward Everett in 1818. Earlier Everett had complained that Europeans were barely aware of American scientific publications, noting that the only copies of Bowditch’s article on mete