At around this age he also developed a new rule for calculating the moon's risings and settings, taking one-quarter of the time of the existing method.

[citation needed] Unlike many other calculating prodigies, Safford did not give public exhibitions.

During his time at Harvard, he was part of the founding class of the Rho chapter of the Zeta Psi fraternity.

[1] The Safford Fund for Williams College student researchers was created by his descendants to honor him.

A portrait of him as a child prodigy hangs in the Hopkins Observatory's Mehlin Museum of Astronomy, adjacent to the Milham Planetarium.