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Captains Of Industry Or Men Of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money - John Harrison

1. Preface

2. David Maydole

3. Ichabod Washburn

4. Elihu Burritt

5. Michael Reynolds

6. Major Robert Pike

7. George Graham

8. John Harrison

9. Peter Faneuil

10. Chauncey Jerome

11. Captain Pierre Laclede Liguest

12. Israel Putnam

13. George Flower

14. Edward Coles

15. Peter H. Burnett

16. Gerrit Smith

17. Peter Force

18. John Bromfield

19. Frederick Tudor

20. Myron Holley

21. The Founders Of Lowell

23. John Smedley

24. Richard Cobden

25. Henry Bessemer

26. John Bright

27. Thomas Edward

28. Robert Dick

29. John Duncan

30. James Lackington

31. Horace Greeley's Start

32. James Gordon Bennett

33. Three John Walters

34. George Hope

35. Sir Henry Cole

36. Charles Summers

37. William B. Astor

38. Peter Cooper

39. Paris Duverney

40. Sir Rowland Hill

41. Marie-Antoine Careme

42. Wonderful Walker

43. Sir Christopher Wren

44. Sir John Rennie

45. Sir Moses Montefiore

46. Marquis Of Worcester

47. An Old Dry-goods Merchant's Recollections







JOHN HARRISON,

EXQUISITE WATCH-MAKER.


He was first a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter, born and reared in
English Yorkshire, in a village too insignificant to appear on any but a
county map. Faulby is about twenty miles from York, and there John
Harrison was born in 1693, when William and Mary reigned in England. He
was thirty-five years of age before he was known beyond his own
neighborhood. He was noted there, however, for being a most skillful
workman. There is, perhaps, no trade in which the degrees of skill are
so far apart as that of carpenter. The difference is great indeed
between the clumsy-fisted fellow who knocks together a farmer's pig-pen,
and the almost artist who makes a dining-room floor equal to a piece of
mosaic. Dr. Franklin speaks with peculiar relish of one of his young
comrades in Philadelphia, as "the most exquisite joiner" he had ever
known.

It was not only in carpentry that John Harrison reached extraordinary
skill and delicacy of stroke. He became an excellent machinist, and was
particularly devoted from an early age to clock-work. He was a student
also in the science of the day. A contemporary of Newton, he made
himself capable of understanding the discoveries of that great man, and
of following the Transactions of the Royal Society in mathematics,
astronomy, and natural philosophy.

Clock-work, however, was his ruling taste as a workman, for many years,
and he appears to have set before him as a task the making of a clock
that should surpass all others. He says in one of his pamphlets that, in
the year 1726, when he was thirty-three years of age, he finished two
large pendulum clocks which, being placed in different houses some
distance apart, differed from each other only one second in a month. He
also says that one of his clocks, which he kept for his own use, the
going of which he compared with a fixed star, varied from the true time
only one minute in ten years.

Modern clock-makers are disposed to deride these extraordinary claims,
particularly those of Paris and Switzerland. We know, however, that John
Harrison was one of the most perfect workmen that ever lived, and I find
it difficult to believe that a man whose works were so true could be
false in his words.

In perfecting these amateur clocks he made a beautiful invention, the
principle of which is still employed in other machines besides
clock-work. Like George Graham, he observed that the chief cause of
irregularity in a well-made clock was the varying length of the
pendulum, which in warm weather expanded and became a little longer, and
in cold weather became shorter. He remedied this by the invention of
what is often called the gridiron pendulum, made of several bars of
steel and brass, and so arranged as to neutralize and correct the
tendency of the pendulum to vary in length. Brass is very sensitive to
changes of temperature, steel much less so; and hence it is not
difficult to arrange the pendulum so that the long exterior bars of
steel shall very nearly curb the expansion and contraction of the
shorter brass ones.

While he was thus perfecting himself in obscurity, the great world was
in movement also, and it was even stimulating his labors, as well as
giving them their direction.

The navigation of the ocean was increasing every year in importance,
chiefly through the growth of the American colonies and the taste for
the rich products of India. The art of navigation was still imperfect.
In order that the captain of a ship at sea may know precisely where he
is, he must know two things: how far he is from the equator, and how far
he is from a certain known place, say Greenwich, Paris, Washington.
Being sure of those two things, he can take his chart and mark upon it
the precise spot where his ship is at a given moment. Then he knows how
to steer, and all else that he needs to know in order to pursue his
course with confidence.

When John Harrison was a young man, the art of navigation had so far
advanced that the distance from the equator, or the latitude, could be
ascertained with certainty by observation of the heavenly bodies. One
great difficulty remained to be overcome--the finding of the longitude.
This was done imperfectly by means of a watch which kept Greenwich time
as near as possible. Every fine day the captain could ascertain by an
observation of the sun just when it was twelve o'clock. If, on looking
at this chronometer, he found that by Greenwich time it was quarter past
two, he could at once ascertain his distance from Greenwich, or in other
words, his longitude.

But the terrible question was, how near right is the chronometer? A
variation of a very few minutes would make a difference of more than a
hundred miles.

To this day, no perfect time-keeper has ever been made. From an early
period, the governments of commercial nations were solicitous to find a
way of determining the longitude that would be sufficiently correct.
Thus, the King of Spain, in 1598, offered a reward of a thousand crowns
to any one who should discover an approximately correct method. Soon
after, the government of Holland offered ten thousand florins. In 1714
the English government took hold of the matter, and offered a series of
dazzling prizes: Five thousand pounds for a chronometer that would
enable a ship six months from home to get her longitude within sixty
miles; seven thousand five hundred pounds, if within forty miles; ten
thousand pounds if within thirty miles. Another clause of the bill
offered a premium of twenty thousand pounds for the invention of any
method whatever, by means of which the longitude could be determined
within thirty miles. The bill appears to have been drawn somewhat
carelessly; but the substance of it was sufficiently plain, namely, that
the British Government was ready to make the fortune of any man who
should enable navigators to make their way across the ocean in a
straight line to their desired port.

Two years after, the Regent of France offered a prize of a hundred
thousand francs for the same object.

All the world went to watch-making. John Harrison, stimulated by these
offers to increased exertion, in the year 1736 presented himself at
Greenwich with one of his wonderful clocks, provided with the gridiron
pendulum, which he exhibited and explained to the commissioners.
Perceiving the merit and beauty of his invention, they placed the clock
on board a ship bound for Lisbon. This was subjecting a pendulum clock
to a very unfair trial; but it corrected the ship's reckoning several
miles. The commissioners now urged him to compete for the chronometer
prize, and in order to enable him to do so they supplied him with
money, from time to time, for twenty-four years. At length he produced
his chronometer, about four inches in diameter, and so mounted as not to
share the motion of the vessel.

In 1761, when he was sixty-eight years of age, he wrote to the
commissioners that he had completed a chronometer for trial, and
requested them to test it on a voyage to the West Indies, under the care
of his son William. His requests were granted. The success of the
chronometer was wonderful. On arriving at Jamaica, the chronometer
varied but four seconds from Greenwich time, and on returning to England
the entire variation was a little short of two minutes; which was
equivalent to a longitudinal variation of eighteen miles. The ship had
been absent from Portsmouth one hundred and forty-seven days.

This signal triumph was won after forty years of labor and experiment.
The commissioners demanding another trial, the watch was taken to
Barbadoes, and, after an absence of a hundred and fifty-six days, showed
a variation of only fifteen seconds. After other and very exacting
tests, it was decided that John Harrison had fulfilled all the
prescribed conditions, and he received accordingly the whole sum of
twenty thousand pounds sterling.

It is now asserted by experts that he owed the success of his watch, not
so much to originality of invention, as to the exquisite skill and
precision of his workmanship. He had one of the most perfect mechanical
hands that ever existed. It was the touch of a Raphael applied to
mechanism.

John Harrison lived to the good old age of eighty-three years. He died
in London in 1776, about the time when General Washington was getting
ready to drive the English troops and their Tory friends out of Boston.
It is not uncommon nowadays for a ship to be out four or five months,
and to hit her port so exactly as to sail straight into it without
altering her course more than a point or two.




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