shop in the house of a Charles Kugler at "the sign of the Seven 

 Stars," corner of Race and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia, in 

 1789. He moved to another address in Race Street in 1790 and 

 was eventually succeeded in business by Martin Fisher, who 

 increased the number of types of glass instruments made and 

 sold at the shop.*'^ 



Henry Voight (1738-1814) was a man with a varied career. Of 

 German ancestry, he was trained as a clock- and watchmaker, and 

 he was a skilled mechanic. He operated a wire mill in Reading, 

 Pennsylvania, in 1780 and moved shortly thereafter to Philadelphia, 

 where he established a clockmaker's shop on Second Street. He 

 became a close friend of the inventor John Fitch in about 1786, and 

 in the following year he became a shareholder in Fitch's company 

 for producing steamboats. In 1792 he entered into a short-lived 

 partnership with Fitch to manufacture steam engines. In 1793 

 he invented a process for making steel from bar iron. In the same 

 year President Washington appointed Voight to the position of 

 chief coiner of the Philadelphia Mint, and he continued in that 

 position until his death in 1814. He was closely associated with 

 David Rittenhouse, Andrew Ellicott, Edward Duffield, and others. 



Although there is no record of Voight's career as an instrument 

 maker, there is nevertheless some evidence that he worked in that 

 field. In the collection of the U.S. National Museum there is a 

 brass equal-altitude telescope (fig. 31) made about 1790, that is 

 signed "Henry Voigt." His name was spelled "Voigt" and 

 "Voight" interchangeably. 



Henry's son Thomas Voight worked as a clockmaker on North 

 Seventh Street in Philadelphia around 1811. He was the maker of 

 a tall case clock, ordered by Thomas Jefferson, that Jefferson's 

 daughter presented in 1826 to her father's physician. Dr. Dungli- 

 son, for settlement of medical services.*'^ 



There were several instrument makers in provincial Pennsylva- 

 nia, but the majority of such craftsmen worked in Philadelphia. 

 Dr. Christopher Witt (1675-1765), an emigrant from England, 

 worked in Germantown from about 1710 to 1765. He was well 

 known locally as a medical doctor, scientist, "hexmeister," clock- 

 maker, and teacher. It is traditionally claimed that he produced 

 mathematical instruments in addition to timepieces. He described 

 the great comet of 1743 and built his own 8-foot telescope. One of 



«5 Ibid., pp. 305-306. 



^® EcKHARDT, op. cit. (footnote 9), p. 195; George Evans, Illustrated History 

 of the United States Mint (Philadelphia: Evans, 1890), p. 114. 



62 



