9781422283271

grandmother was a Caucasian indentured servant named Molly Walsh, who somehow purchased and married an Af- rican slave named Banneka, in defiance of Maryland law. Molly, who reportedly taught Banneker to read, estab- lished a 100-acre farm in Baltimore’s Patapsco River Valley. Baltimore County was then home to some 200 free blacks, along with 4,000 slaves and 13,000 whites. As a youth, Ban- neker, who had three sisters, met Peter Heinrichs, a Quaker teacher who established a small school near the farm. Hein- richs, like all Quakers, was a staunch abolitionist and believer in equality for everyone. He loaned Banneker books and arranged for him to attend classes—a happy state of affairs that continued until Banneker was needed to help work on the farm. Heinrichs was just the first of Banneker’s Cauca- sian mentors, and biographers who question the inventor’s accomplishments sometimes point out that those early sup- porters had a deep emotional investment in touting his bril- liance, sometimes to the point of hyperbole . When Banneker was in his early 20s, he became fasci- nated by a pocket watch owned by a family friend, Josef Levi. Delighted by the young man’s intellectual curiosity, Levi gave Banneker the timepiece as a gift. Banneker re- peatedly disassembled the watch and then put it back to- gether to teach himself how it worked. He hit upon the idea of building a larger version and began borrowing books on geometry and the laws of motion. It took two years of plan- ning (calculating the proper number of teeth for each gear and the necessary spacing between the gears) and build-

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Black Achievement in Science: Inventors