On April 8, 1732, Elizabeth Rittenhouse gave birth to her second child and later named him David. Elizabeth and her husband Matthias might not have known it at the time, but their child would one day grow up to be an influential figure in the fields of astronomy and mathematics. He never attended elementary school and managed to teach himself using his family’s books. He has positively affected the lives of many people by building scale models of the solar system for colleges, helped establish borders for many states and commonwealths, and observed and published an account of one of the rarest predictable astronomical phenomena called a transit of Venus. First, he built scale models of the solar system for colleges. At a young age, he demonstrated a high level of intelligence by creating a working scale model of his…show more content… A transit of Venus is when the planet Venus passes between the Sun and a planet with an orbit outside Venus’, which causes Venus to appear as a black disk moving across the Sun. Usually, this phenomenon repeats every 243 years. Rittenhouse was so excited when he observed it on June 3, 1769, that he passed out for a few minutes. He published his meticulous account of the event in the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions. He then used the observations to calculate the approximate distance from the Earth to the Sun as 93 million miles. In conclusion, David Rittenhouse was an influential figure in both astronomy and mathematics. He also made significant contributions to the government. He lived his life fully, becoming a well-respected individual in the scientific world and positively affecting the lives of many people. People can receive motivation from his contributions because he was a significant figure in fields in which he had no formal education, which shows that anyone can do anything if they are up to the
