William Cranch Bond

William Cranch Bond was an American astronomer and the first director of Harvard College Observatory, born in Falmouth, Maine, on 9 September 1789. Trained by his father as a clockmaker, he built his first clock at fifteen and became an expert at the trade. After seeing the solar eclipse of 1806 he became an avid amateur astronomer and made a room of his house an observatory. In 1815 Harvard sent him to Europe to gather information on observatories. He moved his own instruments to Harvard in 1839 as an unpaid Astronomical Observer, and after the great comet of 1843 stirred public interest he designed the new observatory building, which was equipped with a fifteen-inch German refractor first used in 1847. He independently discovered the Great Comet of 1811 and died in 1859.