The Scientific City

Philadelphia was many things to the eighteenth-century visitor—the largest city in the English colonies, a cosmopolitan commercial center, a hub of revolutionary politics, and a budding center of intellectual exploration. At the same time, it was a relatively small, dense, and unequal city, clamorous with noise and caked with dirt. In 1770, Philadelphia’s population stood at roughly 30,000-40,000 people, compared to London’s 700,000. Was it a provincial outpost of the British Empire, or a true center of capital and culture in the Atlantic world?

By the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia was the indisputable center of science, or “natural philosophy,” in British North America. Institutionally, it boasted the American Philosophical Society, the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and its School of Medicine, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Figures such as Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, and John Bartram gave the City of Brotherly Love an international scientific reputation. Yet Philadelphia’s scientific world extended far beyond these celebrated names. Artisans, artists, instrument makers, printers, collectors, and correspondents—many resident in the city and many scattered throughout the colonies—contributed to a dense intellectual network that looked to Philadelphia as a center of publication, patronage, and scientific exchange. The city’s networks extended throughout the transatlantic world, but the story began at home.

This map takes you on a walking tour of this city of science. It highlights the individuals, institutions, and events that made the Revolutionary City simultaneously a Scientific City. As part of the American Philosophical Society’s “America’s Scientific Revolutionaries” project, the map visually explores how the Revolutionary City and the Scientific City were one and the same, contributing to the project’s larger goal of showing how science was baked into the cake of the United States from the very beginning. This is science at our roots, geographically explained.

I made this map as a Lounsbery Research Assistant at the American Philosophical Society. I had incredible help from Yumi Shiroma (who coded the map) and Adrianna Link.