Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life by Tamara Plakins Thornton (review)

Nathaniel Bowditch’s career does not conform well to the modern ideal of the mathematician. He was, rather, a skilled and exacting calculator, and this ability sufficed to establish his mathematical reputation in the early United States. The connoisseur of lengthy subtitles, wanting to know in what manner this man “changed American life,” will discover that it has much to do with his devotion to numbers. His historic role had little to do with mathematical prowess, deriving instead from his commitment to strict, even pitiless, record keeping and, with it, to orderly budgets and regularized business practices.

This book comes in the guise of a biography. Indeed, it provides an excellent survey of Bowditch’s life, including his family background, childhood, marriage, and children, as well as the opportunities and choices that defined his career. Thornton takes a great interest in his reputation, which was indeed bound up with mathematics and science. As with Thomas Edison a century later, Americans could not distinguish his work from that of a mathematician or scientist (or “man of science”). European academies were willing to bend their customary standards in order to elect this notable figure from the New World as a foreign member. Few, if any, Americans of the early nineteenth century possessed better scientific qualifications. A man like Bowditch, self-educated in mathematics, had no opportunity to master modern analysis. The capstone of his mathematical career, his translation and annotation of four volumes of Pierre Simon de Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste (Paris, 1799–1827), failed to comprehend the mathematical spirit of the original. Even the work with which he first established a reputation, the New American Practical Navigator (Newburyport, 1802), was distinguished mainly by its care in the calculations and printing and its copious explanations of procedures for shipboard astronomical measurement. He claimed to correct 8,000 errors, but almost all of them were in the last digit, which had no practical significance.

Thornton suggests in her introduction that the rise of quantification had more to do with love of numbers than with capitalistic profit maximization or the pursuit of bureaucratic system. In the body of the book, she shows how Bowditch’s insistence on arithmetic order ran together with the deployment of accounts and statistics for organizational control. That orientation, indeed, is what makes this book into much more than a well-researched and engaging biography. In her early chapters, Thornton demonstrates how Bowditch’s work engaged with contemporary navigational and trading practices, and with the social mores of the trading town of Salem, Massachusetts, his family home. She beautifully integrates his laborious calculation of navigational tables with his subsequent dedication to standardized forms, meticulous records, and relentless business mores.

If the Laplace translation represents one culmination of his career, another appears in his systematization of accounts and financial practices in an insurance office and his application of the same principles to three leading American academic institutions. Elite bankers and business men were shocked when he insisted that they adhere to the letter of their contracts, as were the top administrators of Harvard University when Bowditch, from the board of directors, rejected categorically their loose, gentlemanly financial practices. Bowditch stood for a new spirit of numbers. The tremors that he unleashed demonstrate the shocking unfamiliarity of these demands, and how they contributed to a sea change in American life.