Today, we know when to expect cicadas to emerge from underground. People may be annoyed by the sound, but no one is alarmed. That wasn’t always true, however. The first person to track the life cycle of cicadas may have been an 18th-century scientist named Benjamin Banneker.

Banneker was about 17 years old in 1749, when he witnessed the large insects on his family’s land in Maryland. Like many people of the time, he mistook the cicadas for harmful locusts and was relieved when they came to the end of their life cycle. Banneker observed cicadas again in 1766 and 1783. He noted that he saw the insects every 17 years and predicted a reappearance in 1800. He was right.

“Their periodical return is Seventeen years, but they, like the Comets, make but a short stay with us,” Banneker wrote.

In addition to making important observations about nature, Banneker developed many other talents. Born in 1731 to a free Black woman and a formerly enslaved man, Banneker was well educated—at a time when most Black Americans were enslaved and didn’t have the opportunity to attend school—and eventually became an astronomer, a mathematician, and an inventor. Most notably, he published astronomical almanacs with observations of the stars and planets and accurately predicted a 1789 solar eclipse.

Banneker also spoke out against slavery—to none other than Thomas Jefferson. In a 1791 letter to Jefferson, who was the U.S. secretary of state at the time, Banneker called out the fact that while Jefferson had called liberty a right in the Declaration of Independence, he also enslaved people.

Today, Banneker’s land in Maryland is open to the public as the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum.