Almanacs

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Almanacs

Guidebooks. Before 1700 early Americans got their news about the world from random and inconstant sources: the neighbor next door, the clergyman on Sunday mornings, the stranger on the road. But one consistent source of information was the annual almanac. It was a potpourri of news and information. Aside from predicting the weather and the date of the harvest moon, almanacs listed recipes, court dates and locations, and the routes and mileages of local roads. They provided chronologies of events and became the most important vehicle for spreading scientific knowledge in early America.

Astrology and Astronomy. Alongside the most recent European discoveries, the reader of an almanac found astrological tables and diagrams. Benjamin Franklin, more out of playfulness than seriousness, included astrology and prophecies in his first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732). But clearly early Americans expected astrological tables and symbols in their almanacs. There was still a pervasive belief in the influence of the planets on human affairs. Perhaps because almanac publishers were less credulous and more rational, they countered astrology with astronomy. The first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack also included the dates of two lunar and two solar eclipses. Three years later the almanac had a full “description of the planets” in which Franklin provided a detailed guide for the amateur astronomer. As the years passed and Franklin’s own knowledge increased, he included tables on planetary motions, descriptions and diagrams of eclipses, and information on such astronomical events as the transit of Mercury across the disk of the sun. Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1753 and 1754 included extensive analyses on the distance, appearance, and orbits of planets; an inquiry into the nature of comets; and a discussion of Sir Isaac Newton’s ideas on planetary astronomy.

NOR’EASTERS

The daily weather fascinated early American scientists. They kept track of wind direction, changes in temperature, and types of precipitation. Rarely were they able to form valid explanations for weather patterns, much less make accurate predictions. Even so, almanac publishers spent a great deal of print and paper making predictions. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack did its share of weather forecasting from 1732 to 1757. Yet Franklin set himself apart from others with his ability to observe and to analyze weather patterns. In October 1743 a storm prevented Franklin from observing a lunar eclipse. The storm was what New Englanders call a Nor’easter, named for the strong winds from the Northeast. Franklin discovered that Bostonians (living to the Northeast of Philadelphians) observed the eclipse before the storm hit. If the winds blew in from the Northeast, why did the storm hit Philadelphia before Boston? Franklin explained it by thinking about how a fireplace moves air. The fire heats air that rises up the chimney. “The air next [to] the chimney,” Franklin explained in a letter, “flows in to supply its place...; and in consequence the rest of the air successively, quite back to the door.” Likewise, low-pressure rain- or snowstorms that develop along the southeast Atlantic coast move northeast, displacing air. These storms are also called cyclones because they cause winds to move counterclockwise. Franklin realized that as the storm moved up the coast, it paradoxically caused winds to blow from the Northeast when common sense told him they should blow from the Southwest, the direction from which the storm came.

Sources: Benjamin Franklin, The Complete Poor Richard Almanacks, 2 volumes (Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1970); Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938).

New Science. Few almanac publishers were original thinkers. They borrowed their ideas from Europeans and then communicated them to the American reading public. The almanac was something of a textbook of the new ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Newton. In the 1600s most people in America thought that the sun literally rose and set in its orbit around the

earth. By the mid eighteenth century more Americans realized that the ancient idea of an earth-centered universe was wrong. Almanacs did their part in teaching this new conception of the universe. In 1659 the first almanac produced in America, Zechariah Brigden’s A Brief Explication and Proof of the Philolaick Systeme, presented a formal attack on the Ptolemaic (geocentric) universe. A 1674 almanac discussed Kepler’s theory of the elliptical trajectory of planets. A few years later the almanac of John Foster discarded the ancient idea of the “fixed stars” in favor of Galileo’s idea of an infinite universe. During the eighteenth century almanacs carried information on Newton’s laws of motion. Often it was in the annual almanac that colonists first read about Deism, a philosophy that maintained the universe worked without divine intervention. Poor Richard’s Almanack frequently discussed deist ideas.