I have no health for a soldier, and as I have no expectation of serving my country in that way, I am spending my time in the old trifling manner, and am so taken with optics, that I do not know whether, if the enemy should invade this part of the country, as Archimedes was slain while making geometrical figures on the sand, so I should die making a telescope.

Letter to Thomas Barton (Sep 20, 1756) as quoted by Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States (1890) p. 39.