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  101. Rinse not your mouth in the presence of others.

  108. Honour and obey your natural parents altho they may be poor.

  110. Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

  “The Rules of Civility” contain some precepts that might now seem outdated, but many of the rules hold up well. People of any age can take a lesson from “In visiting the sick, do not presently play the physician if you be not knowing,” and can surely apply the admonition not to dispense advice if one is not an authority on a particular subject. Indeed, as archaic as the language in which the rules are couched may sound, their content makes the point that good manners never become outdated.

  The first page of the "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior In Company and Conversation" in Washington's hand. The printing is faded but still legible.

  In his copybooks, George Washington’s script is neat and flowing, almost calligraphic; his drawings of geometrical shapes are precise and artistic. Although his education was limited, Washington’s penmanship and drawings show a student who took care and pride in his work.

  The original order of the pages is not known; in the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. government purchased the exercise pages from a Washington family descendant, and sorted and bound the leaves into copybooks.

  Little is known about George Washington’s education. He once indicated that he had been principally instructed by a private tutor. On the other hand, he may have had some institutional schooling in the last years of his education, as fellow Virginian George Mason, in a mid-1750s letter to Washington, noted that he had run into an “old schoolfellow” of Washington. In any case, whether by private tutor or in school, Washington’s academic education ended when he was about sixteen years old.

  While the original documents from which “The Rules of Civility” were derived may have been intended for use in the schooling of aristocratic children, George Washington’s education in itself was weak by standards of the day for children from families of means. With the inheritances he received at a young age, however, George Washington had financial subsistence, at least in terms of property.

  Washington’s father, Augustine, had four children by his first wife and six by his second. George was the first offspring of his father’s second marriage, to Mary Ball in 1731. Augustine Washington died in 1743, but George, who was eleven at the time, was close to some of his half-siblings, including Lawrence, with whom he traveled to the West Indies and whose Mount Vernon estate eventually passed to George. But it was while living with Lawrence, who became his guardian after his father died, that young George was introduced to the profession of surveying. Lord Fairfax, the cousin of Lawrence’s wife, had massive landholdings in Virginia and dispatched parties to survey his land so squatters could pay taxes. As a teenager, George would sometimes accompany these expeditions, receiving land as compensation for his services. By the time he was seventeen, he was appointed a county surveyor, learning much as he journeyed into the wilderness of the westward land. His youthful experience in the wilderness no doubt aided him later when he commanded the Continental Army and, along with his men, endured great hardships in fighting the British, from fiercely cold winters to meager supplies of food.

  A nineteenth-century illustration of George Washington playing as a youth. While young Washington was becoming acquainted with the vast wilderness, he was also studying to become a proper colonial gentleman.

  Washington’s lack of formal education by no means impeded him from gaining an elevated station in life, which he achieved via his self-confidence, physical strength, natural intelligence, curiosity, and ability to absorb information from people, nature, and the totality of his outside world. While contemporaries like Thomas Jefferson, who became the third U.S. president, and John Adams, Washington’s vice president and presidential successor, were known as great intellects, Washington’s self-determination, resoluteness, and practical abilities no doubt not only allowed him to excel at whatever endeavors he undertook, but enabled him to lead a fledgling nation to heights greater than those to which it might have risen under a genuine scholar. He did make grave military blunders on occasion, and there were bleak times when his armies came close to falling apart, but his strong nature kept his soldiers together.

  Washington heeded well his early lessons on etiquette, because he did indeed grow into a proper colonial gentleman. He was courteous and possessed of great integrity, although he may have been a little too straitlaced. Charles Biddle, the acting chief executive of Pennsylvania, said of him, “He was a most elegant figure of a man, with so much dignity of manners that no person whatever could take any improper liberties with him.”

  As a soldier during the Revolutionary War, Washington was naturally itinerant and was known to have accepted hospitality in many a dwelling in the northeast United States; the familiar phrase “George Washington slept here” derives from his nomadic military life. And through it all Washington maintained his propriety. One might even hazard a guess that in his frequent intercourse with colonial folk, the hero of the emerging nation never took out his false teeth at the dinner table to clean them with the tablecloth, never spoke while he yawned or rinsed his mouth in the company of others, and never put his hands to a part of his body not usually observed. Washington seemed to carry for life the honorable precepts he set down in the 1740s in his schoolboy copybooks.

  LOCATION: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  JOHN HARRISON’S FOURTH

  MARINE TIMEKEEPER

  DATE: 1759.

  WHAT IT IS: The first mechanical device to successfully and practicably measure longitude at sea.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The timekeeper resembles a stopwatch; a silver case encloses the inner mechanism. Its face is white, and it has delicate filigree designs around the hands and numbers.

  Out of desperation, a beleaguered eighteenth-century government offers a fortune to anyone who can solve a seemingly impossible scientific problem that is plaguing the kingdom. A front-runner emerges—not from among the realm’s most brilliant minds, such as Isaac Newton, John Flamsteed, or Edmond Halley—but in the person of the son of a carpenter who is himself unschooled in the ways of natural philosophy.

  This man of undistinguished background toils for many years to perfect an apparatus that solves the intractable problem, rejecting one attempt after another until finally his latest mechanism, radically different from his previous efforts, is demonstrated to be effective and to meet the criteria of the competition. But the jurors, some of whom favor an entirely different solution, fault the apparatus on various grounds, and he receives only half the reward. The man, old now but determined as ever, builds yet another instrument and appeals to the king, finally receiving the balance of the reward money, and the long-awaited and coveted credit for having formulated a solution that will enable the country to dominate the seas and become one of the most powerful nations on earth. His is a story of struggle and determination, hardship and conviction, and ultimately of triumph, a tale with all the makings of a riveting historical novel save for one significant element: it is unequivocally true.

  Even in ancient times people took to the seas, seeing the expansive waters as a path to other lands and cultures. But getting from one point to another in a vast ocean was a problem that persisted through the centuries. Although navigators could determine latitude by calculating a star’s (including the sun’s) altitude at the time it crossed the meridian, longitude—the vessel’s position east or west of a particular point—was also needed for sailors to know where they were. The trouble was, there was no known way to measure longitude.

  Over time, people navigated the seas using a variety of aids. These included everything from observation of the sun, stars, and constellations to sailing directions, landmarks, and charts. Magnetic compasses were in wide use by the fourteenth century, by which time people commonly recognized that the earth was not flat but round. After Columbus, seamen began to
use more sophisticated equipment such as quadrants, cross-staffs, astrolabes, and sextants, as well as almanacs and lunar tables calculated with painstaking effort.

  The probing of the heavens by the Italian scientist Galileo aided navigation. After his discovery of four of the satellites of Jupiter, announced in 1610, Galileo studied the moons’ motions and was able to determine with precision when they would appear from and disappear into the giant planet’s shadow, and in this way Jupiter’s moons functioned as a natural clock for mariners. But the determination of longitude still proved elusive, and the difficulties it posed to European seafarers are evident in the fact that even Galileo embraced the challenge, while the Netherlands offered a sum of 30,000 florins to the person who could successfully devise a method to resolve the problem.

  During the great age of exploration, mariners such as Dias, Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, Balboa, Cortes, Magellan, Carder, Drake, La Salle, and Hudson successfully sailed to far-off lands and claimed for their countries newly discovered areas, but their voyages were difficult and often perilous. The inability to determine longitude made for poor navigation and frequently resulted in mishaps on the seas. One such terrible disaster galvanized a country into finding a solution.

  On the 22nd of October, 1707, the English seamen on the deck of the St. George watched in horror as their sister ship, the Association, having smashed into rocks near the Isles of Scilly, sank rapidly beneath the waves, taking all eight hundred men aboard to their deaths. The inability to determine longitude made such tragedies all too common, and the English government decided once and for all to do something about it. A 1714 act of Parliament established a Board of Longitude for the purpose of administering a competition—the then-vast sum of 20,000 pounds would be awarded to any person who could devise a useful and practical means of determining longitude to within thirty miles, to be demonstrated by a vessel sailing on the ocean for a month and a half.

  The two mainstream approaches were to construct a lunar table, using calculations of the distance of the moon at different times, and to devise a timepiece—that is, a clock or watch—that could withstand the ship’s motion, as well as weather and temperature variations that could cause it to lose or gain seconds. This timepiece would give longitude based on the difference between the time at a known location (to which the timepiece would be set) and the actual time it was for the navigator wherever he was on the water.

  People from all walks of life responded to the parliamentary act. Over the years many solutions were submitted, but none held up to the board’s rigid requirements. More than ten years after the 1714 act was announced, a clockmaker named John Harrison began to ponder the longitude dilemma and how he could solve it. Harrison, born in 1693, was creative in his work, having invented a gridiron pendulum around 1726, about the time he approached the longitude challenge.

  The Yorkshire native was to devote the next forty-seven years to the longitude question. For almost ten years he labored on his first timepiece, a large spring-driven mechanism using rolling balances and a grasshopper escapement with dials representing seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Given a trial run on a frigate sailing to Lisbon, it proved to be a marvelous piece of machinery that efficiently told time and could be used to give the longitude of a vessel, but Harrison thought he could build a better, more accurate mechanism and spent the next five years working toward this end. Containing a few modifications over the first device, the second timekeeper worked well also, but Harrison was again displeased with what he thought were construction problems and commenced working on yet a third timekeeper. As it had previously done, the Board of Longitude, which recognized Harrison’s accomplishments and his potential to create a workable device, granted him a stipend that would enable him to carry out further work.

  The third timekeeper contained an important innovation—a bimetallic strip to correct changes in temperature—as well as other new features, but like its predecessors, it failed to comply with the stringent requirements for accuracy set by the board. This was a blow to Harrison, who had devoted nearly two decades to the construction of this timepiece.

  Harrison, however, was dauntless and even obsessive in his pursuit of the longitude problem; he didn’t retire from the competition but passionately continued his efforts. For the design of his fourth timekeeper, he chose to go in a different direction.

  Rather than create an elaborately constructed piece of machinery with long rods and bar balances and large wheels, Harrison opted for a dramatically different design, one that resembled an ordinary pocket watch. Because of its small size, this timepiece contained miniaturized parts based on those in his previous models, such as the bimetallic strip. After numerous tests of his fourth timekeeper, Harrison was ready for it to undergo a trial sponsored by the board. The trial was carried out in the West Indies early in 1762, with Harrison’s son, William, making the trip and taking the readings. The timepiece worked exceptionally well, with a very small rate of error, but because the Harrisons did not establish the clock’s rate (its daily loss or gain of time) beforehand, the trial was discounted.

  The Board of Longitude allowed another test of Harrison’s fourth timepiece, but by this time the once-sympathetic board had begun to look upon Harrison with disfavor. The board’s membership had changed over the years, and, by now, good progress had been made with the lunar method, which had considerable appeal. Once lunar distances had been calculated, this method was much less expensive than producing a mechanical timekeeper, and was even deemed by some to be more accurate.

  There was friction between Harrison and the board, but both parties managed to persevere in the project. A retrial was held back in the West Indies, and the fourth timepiece once again performed remarkably well, far surpassing the accuracy requirements set out for the competition.

  Still, the reward eluded Harrison, as the board was not convinced he had met the stipulations of the competition. The board decided to grant Harrison the difference between the sums it had previously granted him and ten thousand pounds, to make up half the award, but it would not give him the balance unless he could fulfill a number of conditions. The purpose of the competition was to devise a practical method to determine longitude, and the board insisted Harrison construct and test two additional timekeepers to make sure his original was not a one-of-a-kind anomaly.

  But this was problematic for Harrison. First, his fourth timekeeper was not accessible, as it had been turned over to the board to be copied by another craftsman; and second, he needed more money to construct the additional watches. The board denied Harrison any additional grants, and another defeat occurred when Harrison’s fourth timekeeper underwent a clinical test and did not fare well, owing in part to its poor maintenance at the Royal Observatory where testing was conducted. Nevertheless, the indomitable Harrison was already building another mechanism.

  With the aid of his son, he succeeded in constructing a fifth timekeeper, but because he could not build yet another one to meet the board’s requirement, and because he was disillusioned with the board, he sought help from a higher authority—the king of England, George III. At a demonstration of the timekeeper, the king was wildly impressed. The board was moved once again to conduct an investigation of Harrison’s timekeepers, but it went nowhere; Harrison’s son, William, became agitated by the board’s persistent questioning and walked out. However, in 1773 Parliament and King George recognized John Harrison’s invention and granted him the balance of the reward. Not only was Harrison vindicated, he became venerated.

  After devoting many years to constructing intricate devices that could successfully measure longitude at sea, John Harrison built a different kind of device, the watch pictured above, which finally earned him the acclaim and prize money he sought.

  Harrison’s timekeeper was not the only practical means to determine longitude at this time, as the lunar method was also used, tables predicting the motion of the moon having been available since 1767. And as Harrison’s timekeeper could not easily
be reproduced, later devices more closely became the model for modern marine chronometers. Still, John Harrison, after a lifelong pursuit, introduced with his fourth marine timekeeper a watch that showed longitude could be measured accurately at sea with a mechanical instrument and was an important contributor to the practice of making sea travel safer and more efficient.

  LOCATION: National Maritime Museum, London.

  THE VIRGINIA DECLARATION OF

  RIGHTS

  DATE: 1776.

  WHAT IT IS: A document that sets forth the basic and fundamental natural rights of citizens of colonial Virginia.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a paper folio written on both sides in brown ink. Pages one, two, and three (except for the last several lines) are badly faded, but page four is legible. The two-leafed paper folio, which is permanently housed in an oxygen-free stainless-steel and Plexiglas case, measures 12½ inches high; its folded width is 7½ inches and its open width is 15 inches. Early in the twentieth century, the paper folio was laminated between two layers of silk to strengthen it. The document, which is in poor condition, is permanently stored in a temperature-controlled vault.

  That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Rights … among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty … with the Means of … pursuing … happiness …

  The source of this sublime quote? Many people would say it bears an eerie similarity to the Declaration of Independence. But no, Thomas Jefferson’s hallowed manifesto, a timeless doctrine championing freedom and liberty, came after the Virginia Declaration of Rights, from which the above quote is taken. And there are more lines inked by Jefferson that bear a striking resemblance to the earlier document. But while the Virginia Declaration, which was written chiefly by statesman George Mason, has been acknowledged by scholars as the basis for other documents, such as the U.S. Bill of Rights and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, the substantial similarities between the Declaration of Independence, which launched Thomas Jefferson to immortal fame, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, whose author has languished in relative obscurity over the years, poses an intriguing question: What’s going on here, plagiarism or influence?