Talk:David Rittenhouse

Transit of Venus
The section on the transit of Venus is highly misleading. It seems to suggest that Rittenhouse was the organizer of the effort to estimate the distance of the earth from the sun using the transit, and that he alone did the calculation. In fact it was a suggestion from Halley, and it involved astronomers around the world, including famously Captain Cook in Tahiti -- the same voyage in which he found mainland Australia. The calculation, by its nature, cannot be done by one person in one place since it relies on parallax only measurable from multiple locations on earth.

$ynoptik_m4yh3m (talk) 14:25, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Planet
What planet did he discover? Can we have a link to this planet instead of planets in general?

He didn't discover a planet. I think I have tracked down the original source of that strange claim to a University of Pennsylvania archives page. I contacted them and they have also removed it from their website. --Flying fish 16:25, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rittenhouse is unlikely to have worked with either William Penn or Lord Baltimore, both of whom died before he was born. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.166.34.254 (talk) 20:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Repetitive and badly constructed
While the information in this page is very informative, the way it is presented is repetitive and the whole article is badly constructed.

I do not have time right now to clean it up, but will TRY to come back to it in the next few days or weeks. If anybody would care to start cleaning it up in the meantime, it would be appreciated.

CielProfond (talk) 02:24, 8 June 2008 (UTC)


 * You are right, there is information at the end of the Contributions to the United States about his boyhood and self-education, part of which appears earlier in the article. Needs cleanup. --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)


 * agreed, tried cleaning up the early life section, because it was just listing his inventions after he was 24...:::

Appellative (talk) 21:13, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Citation needed for discovery of Venus atmosphere
The article claims that Rittenhouse discovered the atmosphere of Venus in 1768. A cursory search to confirm this info turned up nothing. The Transit of Venus article indicates that in the 1760s, others predicted that Venus would have an atmosphere, but they were basing this on religious expectations, and they mistakenly thought the black drop effect during the transit was evidence of atmosphere. Apparently this false evidence was accepted for a long time, but at some point, someone figured out that Venus has an atmosphere for correct reasons. I don't know who did it, or when, but I have no reason (yet) to believe it was Rittenhouse. So I am requesting a citation for that statement. —mjb (talk) 21:28, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
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A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
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