Wealth & Money Quote by David Rittenhouse

Rittenhouse is doing something that looks boring on the surface and quietly political underneath: bookkeeping as credibility. The sentence is almost aggressively plain, stitched together with “says” and “believe,” as if he’s trying to launder ego out of the narrative. But that restraint is the point. In the early American scientific world, legitimacy didn’t come from institutions with deep pockets; it came from proving you weren’t a dilettante, a grifter, or a lone genius spinning myths. You had to show the receipts.

The orrery matters here because it’s not just a gadget. It’s a public-facing machine for making the cosmos legible, an Enlightenment showpiece that converts abstract law into moving brass. Paying for it becomes a civic act, and Rittenhouse’s careful attribution to Dr. Smith signals the social scaffolding behind “great men” science: lecturers, organizers, and fundraisers turning knowledge into a shared local enterprise.

The subtext is a dispute without naming the fight. Rittenhouse is pre-empting the familiar academic skirmish over credit and funding: who actually made the thing possible, whose labor got converted into prestige. By anchoring his claim in Dr. Smith’s testimony, he presents himself as fair-minded while still steering the historical record. Even the phrase “true state of the case” reads like a deposition, not a reminiscence, suggesting reputations were on the line.

It’s a snapshot of American science before it was an industry: half classroom, half community fundraiser, and intensely sensitive to who paid, who taught, and who gets remembered.