Benjamin Banneker

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Then one summer, a Quaker school teacher came to live in the valley and he set up school for the boys. The schoolmaster changed the spelling of Benjamin’s last name to Banneker. He had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education by the time he was fifteen, with much of what he knew coming from his grandmother, Molly. She taught him and his brothers how to read, using her bible as a lesson book. Eventually he took over operation of the family farm.
One of the main points in Banneker’s intellectual growth occurred when he was twenty-one. A traveling salesman, Josef Levi, gave Banneker the gift of a pocket watch. Benjamin had never seen anything like this. He spent weeks taking the watch apart and reassembling it to understand the watches inner workings. In 1752 he carved similar watch pieces out of wood and made a clock of his own; the first striking clock to be made completely in America. His clock was so precise that it struck every hour, on the hour for forty years. His ...

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