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Built in 1858, the house was constructed for Ellen Dwight, a great-granddaughter of a genius tinkerer of an earlier era, Thomas Jefferson. Originally seated on twelve acres, its design was inspired by Monticello. Encircled by “a three-sided verandah with segmental openings and chamfered posts,” the house was a stately…
Newton provides an example of how the idea of "science" had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word "scientist" was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called natural philosophers"^^ in an…
In the spring of 1760, [I] went to William and Mary college, where I continued two years. It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small of Scotland, was then Professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent…
I have been racking my brain for the past few weeks trying to think of ways to talk about reason and being reasonable. It turns out it's not a simple subject. I am a very non-confrontational person. I am, most of the time, the very definition of a reasonable man. I don't like telling people things they don't want to…
Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the…
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the…
Thomas Jefferson was a scientist. That's how he described himself. When you visit his home at Monticello, Virginia, the moment you enter its portals you find ample evidence of his scientific interests - not just in his immense and varied library, but in copying machines, automatic doors, telescopes and other…