Nathaniel Bowditch Biography

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Olivia Letts

Mr. Percival

Astronomy, Per. 3

10 Jan. 2013

Nathaniel Bowditch- Navigator and Mathematician

            In 1773, the year of the Boston Tea Party, Nathaniel Bowditch was born in Salem, Massachusetts.  Because his father, Habakkuk, was a shipmaster, he grew up exposed to the idiosyncrasies of seafaring ways in a community where daring mariners were esteemed and blows were delivered against British shipping during the time of the American Revolution.  It was Bowditch’s family’s brief stay in Danvers that shielded him from the dangers of the political and military turmoil that was occurring.  As a child he tried to fill every moment he could learning mathematics; although the school system at that time was poor, there he excelled.  His father was nearly always absent on voyages, and while Bowditch was adored by his mother for his promising future, the family was most often hungry and in a state of near-poverty.  Thus, Habakkuk Bowditch pulled his son out of school, and young Nathaniel became an apprentice clerk at a ship chandler’s shop.  However, he taught himself calculus, and also Latin and French, which allowed him to both read and translate many influential works.  He carried on with his studies all through 1795-1806, during which he undertook many sea voyages aboard merchant ships. As his mathematical, observational, and scientific skills were sharpened he also became a rising businessman and after his final voyage he became president of a prosperous fire and marine insurance company in Salem. 

While president, the mathematical and scientific research he undertook earned him great respect.  His first wife died in 1798 after only seven months of marriage, plunging him into a depression.  He was married again two years later to Mary Ingersoll, with whom he would have

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many children.  The many honors he attained for his work also lent him comfort; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799.  After his New American Practical Navigator was published in 1802, Harvard awarded him a Master of Arts Degree. He became known as the father of modern maritime navigation because of this detailed instructional work, which also improved upon John Moore’s faulty yet influential Practical Navigator.  Harvard would later offer him a chair of mathematics and physics, which he refused along with the U.S. Military Academy and the University of Virginia, though he would also go on to be elected to the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Irish Academy, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Royal Society of London.  Aside from naval charts, Bowditch wrote many astronomical articles based on his observations.  In 1806 he published a well-read article on the motion of the moon.  Using a magnetic needle in some interesting experiments, he illustrated and bolstered concepts of revolution, the Earth’s oblateness (slightly flattened at the poles), and he also corrected parts of the celestial table including meridians and latitudes.  Bowditch wrote publications on meteor showers, and the orbits of three comets, and reportedly demonstrated how to find the place of a meteor.  He added touches to many famous works, including Newton’s.

            Lissajous curves (part of complex parametric equation systems) became known as Bowditch curves due to the man’s groundbreaking mathematical studies on them conducted through the observation of the motion of a pendulum suspended on two points.  Bowditch also translated Pierre-Simon de Laplace’s Mécanique céleste in 1818, to which he added commentary.  He could not afford to have the various volumes published until 1829, 1832, 1834, and 1839, but these translations became vital to the development of theoretical astronomy and mathematics in the United States. He did not form any great theories but instead is admirable for his painstaking mathematical work and tireless observations.  He died in 1838 from stomach cancer, and is said to have thousands of descendents in the United States.