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Biography of Benjamin Banneker
Name: Benjamin Banneker
Birth Date: November 9, 1731
Death Date: October 9, 1806
Place of Birth: Baltimore County, Maryland, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: mathematician, astronomer
Benjamin Banneker
Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), an African American mathematician and amateur astronomer, calculated ephemerides for almanacs for the years 1792 through 1797 that were widely distributed.On Nov. 9, 1731, Benjamin Banneker was born in Baltimore County, Md. He was the son of an African slave named Robert, who had bought his own freedom, and of Mary Banneky, who was the daughter of an Englishwoman and a free African slave. Benjamin lived on his father's farm and attended a nearby Quaker country school for several seasons. He received no further formal education but enjoyed reading and taught himself literature, history, and mathematics. He worked as a tobacco planter for most of his life.In 1761, at the age of 30, Banneker constructed a striking wooden clock without having seen a clock before that time, although he had examined a pocket watch. The clock operated successfully until the time of his death.At the age of 58 Banneker became interested in …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…Two good biographical studies of Banneker are Martha E. Tyson, A Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker (1854), and her Banneker: The Afric-American Astronomer, edited by Anne T. Kirk (1884). All the available source material has been brought together in Silvio A. Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (1972). Other treatments include a brief account in John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947; 3d ed. 1967); Shirley Graham's fictionalized biography, Your Most Humble Servant (1949); Wilhemena S. Robinson's sketch in Historical Negro Biographies (1968); and a chapter in William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1968). Banneker's famous letter to Thomas Jefferson is in vol. 1 of Milton Meltzer, ed., In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro, 1619-1865 (3 vols., 1964-1967). For general background see E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in The United States (1949; rev. ed. 1963), and Winthrop D. Jordan's monumental White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968).
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