Silvio Bedini, the Smithsonian’s great historian of instruments, surveys in Early American Scientific Instruments and Their Makers the surveyors’ compasses, telescopes, and mathematical instruments crafted in colonial and early republican America — and the ingenious artisans, Rittenhouse foremost, who built precision in a wilderness.
It is material history at its best: the young republic seen through its brass and glass. Download the free EPUB and meet America’s first precision engineers.