Invention Timeline – Edmund Blunt, American Hydrographer; Made the First Accurate Survey of New York Harbor
b.November 23, 1799 and d. September 2, 1866
American hydrographer. He made the first accurate survey of New York Harbor; in 1819-’20 the first survey of the Bahama banks and the shoals of George and Nantucket, and in 1824 he surveyed the entrance of New York Harbor from Barnegat to Fire Island. In 1825-’26 he ran levels from the river San Juan to the Pacific Ocean for a canal on the Nicaragua route. In 1855-’56 he determined the exterior lines of New York Harbor. He advocated Fresnel’s system of signal lights and invented the dividing-engine.
Who, that surveys this span of earth we press,
This speck of life in time’s great wilderness,
This narrow isthmus ‘twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities!
Would sully the bright spot or leave it bare,
When he might build him a proud temple there,
A name, that long shall hallow all its space,
And be each purer soul’s high resting-place!
—Lalla Rookh: Moore
If you have great talents, industry will improve
them; if moderate abilities, industry will supply
their deficiencies. Nothing is denied to well-directed
labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.
—Sir J. Reynolds
1799, November 4—Ralph Gout secured a patent on the pedometer, an instrument for numbering the steps taken by a walker.
