inventor mathematician glazier
Thomas Godfrey was born in Bristol Township, Philadelphia. He was the son of Joseph Godfrey, farmer and maltster. While Thomas was still in his infancy, his father died. Later, his mother remarried, and the boy was apprenticed to a glazier.
Godfrey glazed the windows of the State House, now Independence Hall, Philadelphia, when it was built. Employed on similar work at “Stenton, ” the home of James Logan, governor of Pennsylvania, he displayed his natural genius for mathematics, astronomy, and optics, and was encouraged by his employer in his love of the sciences.
In 1730, he invented and made a quadrant for ascertaining latitude, which he claimed was a more certain instrument than Davis’s quadrant, then in general use on British vessels.
Davis’s quadrant required greater exactness and speed on the part of the observer and resulted in a high percentage of error in the observations. This caused vessels frequently to miss the Island of Barbados altogether, obliging them to run down a thousand miles farther to Jamaica.
When Franklin started in business in Philadelphia, he rented part of his house to Godfrey, who became one of the original Junto, though he did not long remain in the society.
Early in the year, 1730 Godfrey began to apply himself to the improvement of Davis’s quadrant transferred to the Mariner’s Bow. Having completed his invention, he entrusted it to Joshua Fisher, of Lewistown, who first tried it in Delaware Bay.
Subsequently, it was given to Capt. Wright, who carried it to Jamaica where “he showed and explained it to several Englishmen, among whom was a nephew of Hadley’s”.
In 1734, Godfrey wrote a letter to the Royal Society, which was about to reward its vice-president, James Hadley, who had given notice of his invention of a quadrant, similar to that devised by the Philadelphian.
Gov. Logan of Pennsylvania, who was regarded as the foremost mathematician then in America, wrote to the secretary of the Royal Society the whole history of Godfrey’s invention and claimed for him some substantial recognition.
Rev. William Smith, nine years after Godfrey’s death, insisted that justice had been denied the Philadelphian, but later accounts assert that the Royal Society sent Godfrey household furniture to the value of £200 as his reward.
Godfrey died in December 1749 and was buried on the farm in Bristol Township where he was born, but in 1838, through the efforts of John F. Watson, his body, together with the remains of the other members of the family buried there, was removed to Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.
One of Godfrey’s sons was Thomas, poet, and playwright.
Quotes from others about the person
“He knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion, ” Franklin wrote of him.
“Like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected universal precision in everything said or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation. ”
He was described by the Rev. William Smith, editor of the American Magazine, as “a man of no education, but perhaps the most singular phenomenon that ever appeared in the learned world, for a kind of natural or intuitive knowledge of the abstrusest parts of mathematics and astronomy”.
