Benjamin Banneker was born outside of Baltimore, Maryland in 1731. He was the son of a slave. His grandfather was a member of the royal family of Africa. His grandfather had been a member of the royal family and was wise in agricultural endeavors. His father, Robert was an African slave who purchased his freedom and his mother, Mary, was the daughter of a freed African slave and an English woman. As a young man he was allowed to enroll in school run by Quakers and had excelled in his studies, esp. in mathematics. Soon, he progressed upon the capabilities of his own math teacher and made up his own math problems in order to solve them.
Banneker was a farmer of modest means. However, he lived a life of unusual achievement. In 1753, the young man borrowed a pocket watch from his well-to-do neighbor. He took it apart and made a drawing of each component. He then re-assembled the watch together and gave it back to its owner. From his drawings, Banneker attempted to carve out from wood enlarged replicas of each part. Calculating the proper number of teeth for each gear and the necessary relationships between the gears, he constructed a wooden working clock that kept accurate time and struck the hours for over 50 years.
At the age of 58, Banneker began studying astronomy and began to predict future solar and lunar eclipses. He compiled the emphemeris, or information table, for annual almanacs that were published for the years 1792 through 1797. "Benjamin Banneker's Almanac" was a top seller from Pennsylvania to Virginia and even to Kentucky. In 1791, Banneker was a technical assistant in the calculating and first-ever surveying of the Federal District, which is now Washington, D.C. The "Sable Astronomer" was often pointed to as proof that African Americans were not inferior to white "European Americans". Thomas Jefferson himself noted this in a letter to Banneker.
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