The Political Scientists: John Ewing and David Rittenhouse
The new Provost and Vice Provost of the University of the State of Pennsylvania were scientists Rev. John Ewing and David Rittenhouse. Despite their very different backgrounds, they were united both by their common interest in astronomy and their commitment to the revolution and to the revolutionary Pennsylvania government.
Provost Ewing was a leading Presbyterian minister who served as Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He was educated in Rev. Francis Alison’s academy and then at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), before arriving in 1758 to teach moral and natural philosophy at the College of Philadelphia. Vice-Provost Rittenhouse was an artisan clockmaker and self-taught astronomer who became a protegé of William Smith. Rittenhouse was also a member of Thomas Paine’s circle in 1776 and one of the creators of Pennsylania’s new 1776 constitution. Rittenhouse’s remarkable Orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, is on display elsewhere on this floor.
Ewing and Rittenhouse had been scientific rivals, at times. They competed to accurately track the transit of Venus across the Sun in 1769, but in the 1780s they worked together on several surveys for the State of Pennsylvania.[1] [Bell’s Patriot Improvers has a good biography of Ewing’s scientific work, put in footnote]. Their alliance in the new University suggests their shared commitment to a new school with a new set of ideals, which put science at the forefront.
A New Symbol for a New School
The first engraved seal of the College of Philadelphia was designed and approved in 1756. Likely designed by Provost William Smith, it featured a stack of seven books, representing a modernized version of the seven liberal arts, with Theology, Astronomy, Philosophy, and Mathematics accompanying the medieval trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. The new University of the State of Pennsylvania replaced this seal with a very different one designed by Francis Hopkinson, featuring David Rittenhouse’s Orrery (on permanent display in the Library), a remarkable model of the solar system. The change suggests that modern science was to be one of the school’s defining features.
Bell, Patriot Improvers. ↑