224 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



my father before I had learned the multiplication table." But, 

 judging from his later achievements, young William must have 

 been the kind of boy that picks up knowledge, so his lack of 

 set schooling was not so great a misfortune as it might 

 seem. 



His eldest sister described him as having been, at the age 

 of fourteen, " a slender boy with soft gray eyes and silky brown 

 hair, quick to observe, yet shrinking from notice, and sensi- 

 tive to excess." She adds, in reference to his early developed 

 tastes : " The first that I remember was his intense anxiety 

 about the expected total eclipse of the sun of June 16, 1806. 

 He had then no instrument of his own, but watched the event 

 from a house top on Summer Street through a telescope be- 

 longing to Mr. Francis Gray, to which somehow he got access. 

 In so doing he injured his eyes, and for a long time was troubled 

 in his vision." 



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

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

 remarkable 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 Perouse, the navigator, which he had found in an old 

 French book. Not having a suitable 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 practised 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, irrev- 

 ocably devoted to astronomy." 



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

 partnership, and the clock-making business was expanded to 

 include the rating, repairing, and making of chronometers. 

 The first seagoing chronometer constructed in America was 

 made by him in 1812. It at once went into service, and satis- 



