02/10/2018
Thomas fuller was an African shipped to America as a slave in 1724. He could calculate the number of months days weeks hours minutes and seconds in any given period of time. The number of poles yards feet and inches in any given distance; and even the sum of geometric progression’s. Not only did he perform these mathematical feats while being interrupted in the process, but he would take less time than most men did with a pencil and paper.
He was paraded by the abolitionists as proof that blacks were not mentally inferior to whites and ridiculed by psychologist as being nothing more then an idiot servant.
When he was 70 years old, two men, William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, natives of Pennsylvania, men of probity and respectable characters having heard, in traveling through the neighborhood in which Fuller lived, of his extraordinary powers in arithmetic, sent for him and had their curiosity sufficiently gratified by the answers which he gave to the Following questions: First, Upon being asked how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000. Second: I’m being asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered and one minute and a half 2,210,500,800.
One of the men who employed himself with his pen and making these calculations told him he was wrong, and the sun was not so great as he said- upon which 70-year-old Thomas Fuller replied: “stop, master, you forget the leap year.” I’m adding the amount of seconds of the leap years the amount of the whole and both their sums agreed, exactly.