Greenwood, Isaac

(b. Boston, Massachusetts, 11 May 1702; d. South Carolina, 12 October 1745)

natural philosophy, education.

After graduating from Harvard College, studying science and perhaps medicine in England, and serving on occasional pulpits, Greenwood was installed at Harvard in 1727 as the first Hollis professor of mathematics and natural and experimental philosophy. His contribution to science in America lay in strengthening and modernizing the science program at Harvard College. He had, in 1726, offered the public an experimental course in mechanical philosophy, for which he published a prospectus. To his new professorship he brought this experience, the gift for teaching, a good knowledge of science, keen powers of observation, and an excellent collection of apparatus contributed by Thomas Hollis.

Greenwood’s course made use of experiment and demonstration and probably rested heavily upon Newton’s work, as did his public lectures. He took an important step to improve the level of Harvard preparation in mathematics in 1729, when he published Arithmetick, Vulgar and Decimal, a good textbook. He produced a manuscript text on algebra and seems to have taught Newtonian fluxions. His success was substantial but, after several attempts to reform him, the Harvard Corporation dismissed him in 1738 for excessive drinking. Thereafter, Greenwood sought to set up a private school of experimental philosophy in Boston, delivered lectures in Philadelphia, and went to sea as a tutor. At his death his career was in ruins, but his service to science was best measured by the tradition he developed at Harvard and by the students he inspired, including Professor John Winthrop.

During his professorship Greenwood published three papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: one urging the charting of winds, another a study of the effects of damps in wells, and the third a description of an aurora borealis. In response to an English request he made very careful drawings of the inscriptions on Dighton Rock, now understood to have been of Indian origin. Precision and care marked all of this work, but it was less significant than his teaching.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Greenwood published a number of items related to his teaching: An Experimental Course of Mechanical philosophy (Boston, 1726); Course of Philosophical Lectures (n. d.); Arithmetrick, Vulgar and Decimal: With the Application Thereof to a Variety of Cases in Trade and Commerce (Boston, [1729]); and Prospectus of Explanatory Lectures on the Orrery (Boston, 1734). He also wrote A Philosophical Discourse Concerning the Mutability and Changes of the Material World (Boston, 1731) and three papers which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: “A New Method for Composing a Natural History of Meteors,” 35 (1710–1731), 390–402; “A Brief Account of Some of the Effects and Properties of Damps,” 36 (1731–1732.), 184–191: and “Of an Aurora Borealis Seen in New-England, Oct. 22, 1730,” 37 (1732- 1733), 55–69. There are Greenwood MSS in the Harvard University archives and in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

II. Secondary Literature. The only good account of Greenwood is Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, VI (Boston, 1942), 471–482, which includes Frederick G. Kilgour:, “Isaac Greenwood and American Science,” and the best bibliography.

Brooke Hindle