THe life and accomplishments of Benjerman bannaker

Essay by dough15boyHigh School, 12th gradeA-, April 2002

download word file, 1 pages 4.2

Downloaded 109 times

Benjamin Banneker was a self-educated mathematician and astronomer. Banneker was America?s first black man of science. The name Banneker origedanated from Bannakar his granddad name which meant ?Power?. Born in 1731 a free black oldest to three girls and look over his sisters while his parents were working in the fields, Banneker was raised on a tobacco plantation in the British Colony of Maryland. Banneker received little formal schooling because he had to help his two parents run their farm. Banneker developed ?an extraordinary aptitude for calculating math when he was in his early twenties?. He constructed a perfectly operating wooden clock after studying the workings of a pocket watch.

A tobacco planter for most of his life, Banneker began studying astronomy when he was 57 years old. Before long he figuring out the exact times of sunrise and sunsets and performing other astronomical calculations. There were the early kinds of findings that made an almanac one of the most indispensable books in early America, in 1790 Banneker attempted to publish his work.

Banneker efforts were interrupted; however when he was chosen to assist Andrew Ellicott in making a survey of the land that was to become the District of Columbia, the young nation new capital.

In 1791 Banneker left the survey to complete his scientific work. With that said Banneker published his first almanac later in the year, and antislavery activists were quick to champion the accomplishment. In deed, where ever abolitionists argued that blacks deserved the same opportunities as a white man, the person they singled out most often as a model of black achievement was non other than Benjamin Bannekers