Monticello Blog

Thomas Jefferson knew a thing or two about epidemics. The virulent diseases most feared in his time were smallpox and yellow fever.

Jefferson’s more scientific side is on full display at Monticello in a treasure-trove of timekeeping devices ranging from sundials to gongs, to various types of clocks.

Imagine a world where life moved at four miles an hour, and the most one could readily travel in a day was just thirty miles. Such was the slow world Thomas Jefferson was born into in 1742.

For Jefferson, almost any activity could be transformed into an act of citizenship.

Before he was President, before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, before the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson feared an invisible enemy.

Before the era of Wii’s, Twitter, and Netflix, the Jefferson family entertained themselves with music, reading aloud, or scientific inquiry. As part of an ongoing campaign to restore Monticello’s interiors, curators recently acquired an air pump similar to Jefferson’s lost original.

It is claimed, by websites and other sources various and sundry, that Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of a meteorite crash in Connecticut in 1807 and its subsequent reportage by two professors at Yale, scoffed that it "was easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven."

Picking up a recent Economist magazine, an article discusses how desalination of the oceans for usable water is becoming less expensive these days. What does this have to do with Jefferson?