Benjamin Banneker
A name revered in virtually every African American household, Benjamin Banneker is remembered as the black farmer who surveyed the land on which the nation's capitol was built and who wrote an explosive, much-publicized letter to Thomas Jefferson, accusing him and the other Founding Fathers of going back on their pledge to preserve the self-evident rights of all its people. But, as Charles Cerami shows in this fascinating biography, while those two accomplishments were indeed remarkable, they only hint at the true scope of Banneker's genius.
Benjamin Banneker was born in rural Maryland in 1731, the descendent of slaves. Early on, he demonstrated extraordinary mathematical and analytical abilities, along with a photographic memory. Between twelve-hour shifts on the family farm, young Banneker, without the benefit of formal schooling and with little more than a handful of borrowed texts as his guide, achieved excellence as a mathematician and astronomer, and honed an elegant writing style on par with the finest writers of his day. Later in life, his self-taught expertise as a surveyor led to his playing a pivotal role in planning Washington, D.C. And his "Banneker's Almanac," first appearing in 1791 and continuing as a bestseller for years after, was celebrated for the accuracy of the celestial movements it provided navigators and its weather forecasts, as well as its humorous anecdotes, philosophical essays, and extraordinarily fine prose and poetry.
But Banneker's most remarkable achievements were in the field of astronomy. Long before the Hubble Orbiting Telescope, he hypothesized that the unusual changes in the light coming from Sirius, the Dog Star, could be attributed to the now established fact that it is actually two stars in orbit around one another. More than a century before technology enabled astronomers to confirm that many stars are circled by planets, Banneker wrote of "extra-solar" planets that were probably inhabited by sentient beings. And his speculations about light and the relative nature of time anticipated Einstein's thinking by more than a century.
"Benjamin Banneker" is the long-overdue biography of a true American hero and a scientific genius of the first order, and the first step in securing for its subject the place in history he undoubtedly deserves.
