Harrison Genealogy Repository

Notes

Went to Cincinatti, served as Judge in the Supreme Court of Ohio ^[S2]

Notes

Invented chronometer, gridiron, and pendulum for clocks. His first completed pendulum clock was in 1713 before the age of 20. The clock is unique because it is constructed entirely of wood and is on display at The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers' one-room museum at Guildhall in London.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.

p. 62-63

"John 'Longitude' Harrison was born March 24, 1693, in the county of Yorkshire, the eldest of five children. His family, in keeping with the custom of the time, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns, and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only daughter, and two of his three daughters-in-law all answered to the name Elizabeth.

His first home seems to have been on the the estate, called Nostell Priory, of a rich landowner who employed the elder Harrison as a carpenter and custodian. Early in John's life -- perhaps around his fourth birthday, not later than his seventh - the family moved, for reasons unknown, sixty miles away to the small Lincolnshire village of Barrow, also called Barrow-on-Humber because it sat on the south bank of that river.

In Barrow, young John learned woodworking from his father. No one knows where he learned music, but he played the viol, rang and tuned the church bells, and eventaully took over as choirmaster at the Barrow parish church. (Many years later, as an adjunct ot the 1775 publication explaining his timekeepers, A Desription Concerning Such Mechanism ..., Harrison would expound his radical theory on the musical scale.)"

p. 67

"Forthright in his personal encounters, Harrison proposed marriage to Elizabeth Barrel, and she became his wife on August 30, 1718. Their son, John, was born the following summer. Then Elizabeth fell ill and died in the spring before the boy turned seven.

....

The parish records show that he found a new bride, ten years younger, within six months of Elizabeth's death. Harrison wed his second wife, Elizabeth Scott, on November 23, 1726. At the start of their fifty years together they had two children --- William, born in 1728, who was to become his father's champion and right-hand man, and Elizabeth, born in 1732, about whom nothing is known save the date of her baptism, December 21. John, the child of Harrison's first marriage, died when he was only eighteen."

p. 126

"Two compelling likenesses of John Harrison, both made during his lifetime, survive into ours. The first is a formal portrait in oils by Thomas King, completed sometime between October 1765 and March 1766. The other is an engraving by Peter Joseph Tassaert, from 1767, obviously taken from the painting, which it copies in almost every detail. "

p. 147

"In January 1772, William wrote the king a poignant letter covering the history of his father's hardships with the Board of Longitude and the Royal Observatory. William asked politely, beseechingly, if the new Watch (H-5) might 'be lodged for a certain time in the Observatory at Richmond, in order to ascertain and manifest its degree of excellence.' The king than interviewed William at length at Windsor Casle. In a later account of this pivotal meeting, written in 1835 by William's son, John, the king is reported to have muttered under his breath, 'These people have been cruelly treated.' Aloud he promised William, 'By God, Harrison, I will see you righted!'"

p. 152

When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day after his birth in 1693, he held matyr status among clockmakers. For decades he had stood apart, virtually alone, as the only person in the

world seriously pursuing a timekeeper solution to the longitude problem. Then suddently, in the wake of Harrison's success with H-4, legions of watchmakers took up the special calling of marine timekeeping. ... Indeed,

some modern horologists claim that Harrison's work facilitated England's mastery over the oceans, and thereby led to the creation of the British Empire --- for it was by dint of the chronometer that Britannia ruled the waves." ^[S494]

Notes

Perserver of the old water bottle of her grandfather's, Isaiah Harrison, voyage to America on the Spotted Calf.