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. Before he was fifteen years old he had constructed at odd times a reliable shop chronometer. He had no model to go by, but made it after a description of an instrument used by La Pérouse, the navigator, which he had found in an old French book. Not having a suitable spring to put into it, he contrived to run it by weights. About a year later he made a good working quadrant out of ebony and boxwood, the best materials he had. His son, George Phillips Bond, has thus described this instrument: "It is no rude affair, but every part, especially the graduation, the most difficult of all, shows the neatness, patience, and accuracy of a practiced 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."
About the time he became of age his father took him into partnership, and the clock-making business was expanded to include the rating, repairing, and making of chronometers. The first seagoing chronometer made in America was made by him in 1812. It at once went into service, and satisfactorily stood the test of a voyage to and from the East Indies. In 1810 the Bonds removed their business to Congress Street, and the family took up its abode in Dorchester.
Mr. Bond regarded his watching of the eclipse when he was seventeen years of age as the event that determined his pursuit of astronomy. Certain it is that he never after then abandoned it. Five years later he first came under the notice of older astronomers, and in this way: Prof. John Farrar, of Harvard College, having caught sight of a comet on September 4, 1811, watched its subsequent progress and published a paper on it in the memoirs of the American Academy. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch, of Salem, to whom he communicated this discovery, did the same, and the comet was watched also by others. Before presenting his paper to the academy, Prof. Farrar learned that young Bond had seen the comet in the preceding April. He mentioned this fact in the account of his own observations and added the following notes, with which, he says, Mr. Bond had "obligingly favored" him:[1]
- ↑ Much of the material here employed is derived from a historical sketch of the Harvard College Observatory, prepared by Mr. Daniel W. Baker, which first appeared as a series of newspaper articles, and was afterward reprinted in pamphlet form as one of the official publications of the observatory.
