In the early nineteenth century, Nathaniel Bowditch may have been the most famous scientist and mathematician in the United States. Author of the New American Practical Navigator, the best-selling navigation manual in the nation, Bowditch was known as a purveyor of a practical-minded science. This reputation earned him a mention in Moby-Dick, where Ishmael warns a shipowner not to hire young men prone to “unseasonable meditativeness” and German philosophy “instead of Bowditch in his head.” Tamara Plakins Thornton's graceful, frequently delightful biography, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life, encourages us to see Bowditch in a new light as the creator of business practices that had far-reaching consequences.

In some ways, Thornton's book is slightly ahead of its time in applying the approaches of the cultural history of science to business history, or more fashionably, “the history of capitalism.” This science-business intersection was the subject of a conference, Techniques of the Corporation, at the University of Toronto in spring 2017 as well as a forthcoming issue of Osiris. We will see more works centered in this juncture in the coming years. Thornton brings the history of science and business history together in several ways, but the book's central problematic revolves around the sociology of trust. Thornton's book joins the work of historians of science—like Theodore Porter, Steven Shapin, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison—who have written about how individuals and groups came to place trust in numbers and scientific findings, with the writings of business and cultural historians, like Karen Halttunen, Stephen Mihm, and Scott Sandage, who have examined trust, fraud, credit, and con men in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bowditch worked to resolve issues and anxieties around trust by creating impersonal, rule-bound, rational business practices, rooted in innovations like the blank form. But he came to these solutions only slowly.

Bowditch was born in 1773 to a family with rich and powerful social and kin connections in Salem, Massachusetts, yet his own father ended life a failure and left few means to his children. As a young man, Bowditch apprenticed as a bookkeeper in a Salem chandlery before gaining his firsthand experience as clerk and then supercargo on the sea. In was in the colonial world of port cities, like Batavia, Manila, and Saint-Denis, that Bowditch came to fully grapple with the maritime world of confidence and uncertainty. As Thornton asks, “Who could one trust in these untried ports?” (p. 55). Bowditch was successful enough in these ventures to gain prominence in the Salem business community.

Another thing that made Bowditch trustworthy and desirable was his mastery of numbers. He was self-taught from a young age. He lacked the classical training and Harvard education of a gentleman and always had his rough edges. Yet, he longed to be a member of the international Republic of Letters. Over time, he became one, first through a series of astronomical observations and speculations, which were reprinted in European journals. Bowditch's personal genius, however, lay in applying numbers to the practical world in new ways. This habit began with the publication of the New American Practical Navigator and continued with his creation of blank forms and other novel methods of bookkeeping and order making. At the end of this line of development lay the kinds of paperwork and office technologies described in histories like JoAnne Yates's Control through Communication (1989), but such advances were still far off in Bowditch's day.

Bowditch was at the cutting edge of business practice in other ways as well. In Salem, he helped manage family trusts, a new organizational and legal form in the American landscape. This work eventually led to his moving to Boston and being hired by the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, which was neither a hospital nor particularly focused on life insurance. Instead, it was a trust that invested the wealth of a who's who of Boston society, “well stocked with Appletons, Cabots, Eliots, Grays, Lawrences, Lees, Lowells, Perkinses, and Thorndikes” (pp. 164–65). Trusts pooled “the wealth of an entire class” and thus served “Brahmin economic power as a whole” (p. 164). It was in this role that Bowditch fashioned his most systematic, rule-based business practices in an effort to bring about a perfectly functioning “clockwork corporation.” Later, Bowditch applied these same practices to reforming Harvard University, the Athenaeum, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thornton's greatest contribution is in describing what moved Bowditch. Her book shares the message of many biographies: while there are many impersonal forces and social structures in this world—including, in this story, bureaucratization and the capitalist drive for efficiency and rationality—individuals are driven by their own motivations and reasons. Thornton argues that Bowditch cared more for the beauty of math than for bureaucracy. Bowditch, the author of a four-volume translation and extensive commentary on Pierre-Simon Laplace's masterpiece of physics, Mécanique Céleste, had a passion for “the sublimity of mathematics” (p. 111). He sought to reproduce the regularity and dependability of the heavens in earthly ventures.

Like many books of its type, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers struggles to establish that Bowditch had any great influence on society beyond his sphere or on national or international business practice. The reception and uptake of an individual's ideas is hard to prove. Yet these kinds of causal questions are almost a distraction from the richness, beauty, and power of Thornton's text. Its strength lies in its ability to reconstruct, often in a firsthand manner, what it was like to inhabit a social world like Bowditch's and, thus, what his scientific and business efforts meant to him and those around him. It is a richer and more interesting world than the one viewed in earlier works, which cast reason and profit as impersonal, gray forces that seemed to move on their own accord.