II.
A casual glance at the circumstances of the beginning of the famous observatory in the neighboring city of Cambridge will show that a most important contribution to the success of that enterprise was made by the first director of the observatory, Prof. W. C. Bond. The more diligently those circumstances are studied, the stronger will be the conviction that his work, while it was that of designer and organizer, was also somewhat better in the sense of being more rare in quality; that his presence and enthusiasm gave the institution vitality. The record of his life gives him title to rank among eminent Americans.
William Cranch Bond was born in Portland, Me., Sept. 9, 1789. He was the youngest son of William and Hannah (Cranch) Bond, who were natives of England. The family was of distinction there, and is genealogically traceable to the time of William the Conqueror, or earlier. The Brandon manor is said to have been granted by that monarch to the ancestor of this line, and to have been held by the family through many generations. William Bond was born In Plymouth, Eng. Richard Cranch, an uncle of Hannah, settled in Braintree, Mass, in 1751. The name, in himself and his descendants, became distinguished in the annals of the province and commonwealth. From him William Bond received information which induced him to emigrate to this country. He located for business purposes at Portland, then Falmouth, and engaged in cutting ship-timber at Frenchman’s bay, sending the commodity to England. He made a voyage thence to England, returning with his wife and elder children. The timber business proved in the end unprofitable and he removed to Boston in 1793, where he established himself in his vocation of clockmaker and silversmith, his stand being at the corner of Milk and Marlboro, now Washington street. The youth of William C. Bond was, accordingly, spent in Boston, where he had such education as the common schools afforded. Indeed, that he did not have fully that privilege, may be inferred from his remark quoted by Josiah Quincy, that pecuniary restrictions “obliged me to become an apprentice to my father before I had learned the multiplication table.” Mainly he was self-taught, though doubtless he derived instruction from his father, who was a well-informed man, and from some of the Cranch relatives, who were of good education. The traditions of the family and the facts of his career, indicate his mental quality to have been that of genius, one trait of which is that it absorbs congenial knowledge from unpromising materials and amidst adverse conditions.
PROF. W. C. BOND.
His eldest sister wrote of him as having been, at the age of 14, “a slender boy with soft gray eyes and silky, brown hair, quick to observe, yet shrinking from notice, and sensitive to excess.” She adds, in reference to his early-developed tastes: “The first that I remember, was his intense anxiety about the expected total eclipse of the sun of June 16, 1806. He had then no instrument of his own, but watched the event from a house-top on Summer street through a telescope belonging to Mr. Francis Gray, to which, somehow, he got access. In so doing he injured his eyes and for a long time was troubled in his vision.” An elder brother writes Of him at this early period: “He was the mildest and best-tempered boy I ever knew, and his remarkable mechanical genius showed itself very early.” He adds that in devising and making bits of apparatus that boys use in their sports, William was chief among his comrades. His early apprenticeship in the clockmaking business undoubtedly gave a fortunate discipline to this natural ingenuity, by confining his experiments pretty closely to the facilities of his father’s workshop as to tools and materials.
He found or made “idle time” enough before he was 15 years old to construct a reliable shop chronometer. It had to be a fixture, for lacking a suitable spring he contrived to run it by weights.
When he was about 16 years of age he made a good working quadrant out of ebony and boxwood, the only materials he had. His son, G. P. Bond, wrote of this instrument, years afterwards: “It is no rude affair, but every part, especially the graduation, the most difficult of all, shows the neatness, patience, and accuracy of a practised artist. A better witness to the progress he had already made in astronomy could not be desired. It is all that the materials would admit of, and proves that he must have been, even then, irrevocably devoted to astronomy.”
How these “eccentricities of genius” were looked upon by the senior Mr. Bond does not appear, but, at any rate, William was made a member of the firm about the date of his majority, and forthwith the clockmaking business was expanded to include the rating, repairing and making of chronometers. Astronomy could now go hand in hand with “business.” He must have had the means of ascertaining the true local time before he was himself owner of an instrument suited to that purpose. He made his first seagoing chronometer in 1812, and it was the first made in America. Its engraved trade mark was “Wm. C. Bond, 1812.” It at once went into service, and satisfactorily stood the test of a voyage to and from the East Indies. For making this he had a working model; the stationary or shop chronometer of 1804 was made according to a description he found in an old French book of a chronometer used by La Perouse, the navigator. In 1810 the business of the Bonds was removed to Congress street. About the same time the family removed to Dorchester where for a while they occupied, as tenants, different houses.
Mr. Bond himself said in his later years that what first gave him a determination for astronomy was his experience of the total eclipse of 1806. Once aroused, the feeling never ceased to have sway, and it modified all his business ambitions as a chronometer maker. But as such an artisan he had excuse in the eyes of the practical minded for his loved explorations into the starry depths. In the lack of proper instruments his earliest observations were made by crude methods, which yet gave proof of his originality and of the fascination which the study had for him. It was soon after 1811 that he first gained recognition from any one competent to pass judgment upon his essential mental qualities. On Sept. 4, 1811, Prof. John Farrar of Harvard College first caught sight of a comet in the western sky. He appears to have at once notified Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch of Salem, and they two, and a few others in New England who had telescopes, traced its subsequent progress. Each of the two published an account of his observations in the Memoirs of the American Academy. Prof. Farrar having given in his introductory paragraph the date of his first observation, adds that the comet had been seen earlier by Mr. Bond of Dorchester, whom he calls “William Bond, Jr.,” and says that Mr. Bond had “obligingly favored” him with the following notices: