Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers

In this engagingly written biography Tamara Plakins Thornton delves into the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) a man Thomas Jefferson once called a “meteor in the hemisphere.” Bowditch was a mathematician astronomer navigator seafarer and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe Bowditch operated and represented some of New England’s most powerful institutions—from financial corporations to Harvard College—as clockwork mechanisms. By examining Bowditch’s pathbreaking approaches to institutions as well as the political and social controversies they provoked Thornton’s biography sheds new light on the rise of capitalism American science and social elites in the early republic.<br/><br/>Fleshing out the multiple careers of Nathaniel Bowditch this book is at once a lively biography a window into the birth of bureaucracy and a portrait of patrician life giving us a broader more-nuanced understanding of how powerful capitalists operated during this era and how the emerging quantitative sciences shaped the modern experience.