SKETCH OF WILL [AM C RANCH BOND. 401 



An elder brother writes of him at this early period, " He was 

 the mildest and best tempered boy I ever knew, and his remark- 

 able mechanical genius showed itself very early." He adds that 

 in devising and making bits of apparatus that boys use in their 

 sports, William was chief among his comrades. Before he was 

 fifteen years old he had constructed at odd times a reliable shop 

 chronometer. He had no model to go by, but made it after a 

 description of an instrument used by La Pe"rouse, the navigator, 

 which he had found in an old French book. Not having a suit- 

 able spring to put into it, he contrived to run it by weights. 

 About a year later he made a good working quadrant out of ebony 

 and boxwood, the best materials he had. His son, George Phillips 

 Bond, has thus described this instrument : " It is no rude affair, 

 but every part, especially the graduation, the most difficult of all, 

 shows the neatness, patience, and accuracy of a practiced artist. 

 A better witness to the progress he had already made in astron- 

 omy could not be desired. It is all that the materials would admit 

 of, and proves that he must have been, even then, irrevocably 

 devoted to astronomy." 



About the time he became of age his father took him into 

 partnership, and the clock-making business was expanded to in- 

 clude the rating, repairing, and making of chronometers. The 

 first seagoing chronometer made in America was made by him 

 in 1812. It at once went into service, and satisfactorily stood the 

 test of a voyage to and from the East Indies. In 1810 the Bonds 

 removed their business to Congress Street, and the family took 

 up its abode in Dorchester. 



Mr. Bond regarded his watching of the eclipse when he was 

 seventeen years of age as the event that determined his pursuit of 

 astronomy. Certain it is that he never after then abandoned it. 

 Five years later he first came under the notice of older astron- 

 omers, and in this way : Prof. John Farrar, of Harvard College, 

 having caught sight of a comet on September 4, 1811, watched its 

 subsequent progress and published a paper on it in the memoirs 

 of the American Academy. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch, of Salem, to 

 whom he communicated this discovery, did the same, and the 

 comet was watched also by others. Before presenting his paper 

 to the academy, Prof. Farrar learned that young Bond had seen 

 the comet in the preceding April. He mentioned this fact in the 

 account of his own observations and added the following notes, 

 with which, he says, Mr. Bond had " obligingly favored " him : * 



* Much of the material here employed is derived from a historical sketch of the Har- 

 vard College Observatory, prepared by Mr. Daniel W. Baker, which first appeared as a 

 series of newspaper articles, and was afterward reprinted in pamphlet form as one of the 

 official publications of the observatory. 

 vol. xlvii. 33 



