plete chain of conductors terminating in the sea. The same principles have been applied to the protection of the royal palaces, the new houses of parliament, the powder magazines, and other public buildings. In 1835 the Royal Society conferred on him the highest honour it can bestow, the large Copley medal; in 1845 he received a vase from the emperor of Russia, and in 1847 he was knighted by her majesty. Besides his contributions to the Royal Society, to the British Association, and to other learned institutions, he wrote "Effects of Lightning on Floating Bodies;" a work on the "Nature of Thunder-storms," 1845; and three valuable treatises on "Electricity;" "Galvanism;" and "Magnetism," published between 1849 and 1855. He died 22nd January, 1867.—G. BL.
HARRIS. See Malmesbury, Earl of.
HARRISON, John, the first maker of chronometers sufficiently accurate for the determination of the longitude at sea, was born in 1693 at Faulby, near Pontefract, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died in London on the 24th of March, 1775. He was the son of a carpenter, and in his youth practised his father's trade, as well as that of a joiner and cabinetmaker, at Barrow in Lincolnshire. Being occasionally employed to repair clocks and watches, he turned his attention to their manufacture, in which he attained extraordinary skill. In 1726 he removed to London, where he established himself as a clock and watchmaker. In the same year he invented the "gridiron compensation pendulum," in which the downward expansion of bars of a less expansible metal is counteracted by the upward expansion of bars of a more expansible metal, so as to preserve the time of oscillation unchanged in all changes of temperature. This was the second compensation pendulum invented, the first having been Graham's mercurial pendulum. In the same year also, Harrison invented the compensation balance for watches, in which compound bars—each made of a layer of a more expansible metal and a layer of a less expansible metal soldered together—alter their curvature by changes of temperature, and thus change the positions of weights carried at their ends, in such a manner as to counteract the effect of the same changes of temperature on the lengths of the arms of the balance, from which the compound bars project. Amongst other improvements introduced by Harrison into watchmaking, was the spring which keeps up the motion while the watch is wound up. In 1714, the British government had offered a reward for a method of determining the longitude at sea, whose amount was to be regulated by the accuracy of the determination—£10,000 if the error did not exceed one degree; £15,000 if it did not exceed forty minutes; £20,000 if it did not exceed half a degree. Harrison, having resolved to compete for the highest reward, completed the first marine chronometer in 1735, and tested it during a trip between Portsmouth and Lisbon. It was approved of by Halley, Graham, Bradley, and Smith, and through their influence he got some temporary assistance in 1737. Thus he was enabled to complete a second chronometer in 1739, and a third in 1741. In 1749, a gold medal was awarded to him by the Royal Society for his improvements. In 1761 he completed a fourth chronometer, more accurate than any of the preceding, and submitted it to the board of longitude. It was tested under the charge of his son, William Harrison, during a series of voyages; and the error proved to be considerably less than the smallest error contemplated by the government. He received successively two instalments of £5000 each; and in 1767, having fulfilled the condition of publishing such a description of his chronometer as enabled another watchmaker (Kendall) to make one similar, he was paid the balance of £10,000 after half a century of persevering labour.—W. J. M. R.
HARRISON, Thomas, one of Charles I.'s judges and a major-general in Cromwell's army, was born in 1606. Most probably he was the son of a grazier near Newcastle-under-Lyne. Sent to London when young, he is said to have been trained in the office of an attorney. On the breaking out of the civil war Harrison entered the parliament army, and fought at Marston Moor as a major. His zeal and military skill both contributed to advance him; and through all the transactions of those times we find him vigorously siding with the army, first against the king, and then against the parliament. He was one of the commissioners by whom Charles was condemned to death. In 1650 he had attained the rank of major-general, and he commanded a brigade of horse at Worcester. It was Harrison whom Cromwell beckoned to his side and consulted just before he rose in the house of commons and pronounced the doom of the Rump; and Harrison's apostrophe on that occasion to the reluctant speaker, Lenthall, "Sir, I will lend you a hand," is among the sayings of history. When Cromwell became protector, however, the republican Harrison repudiated his old comrade, and as a leader of the Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men fiercely opposed the new government. After the Restoration, on the 10th of October, 1660, he was tried for his participation in the death of Charles, and was executed a few days afterwards, dying cheerfully and fearlessly. There is a fair memoir of him in the volume of Trials of Charles I. and the Regicides, published in the Family Library.—F. E.
HARRISON, Thomas, an eminent English architect, was born at Richmond in Yorkshire in 1744, and died at Castlefield in Cheshire, on the 29th of March, 1829. By the liberality of Lord Dundas he was enabled to go to Rome in 1765, where he not only studied architecture, but practised it with much success and credit. In 1770 he returned to England, and established himself at Chester. The Lune bridge at Lancaster, finished in 1783, was designed by him. It was the first bridge in England with a level roadway, although similar bridges had previously been built in France from the designs of Perronet. He designed many important public buildings at Chester, and the palace of Count Woronzow, on the Dnieper. His most famous work was the Dee bridge at Chester, a single arch, which, until the erection of the Ballochmyle bridge over the Ayr, was the largest stone arch in the world, being two hundred feet in span. It is in many respects a model of bridge-building.—W. J. M. R.
HARRISON, William, an English historian, who was educated both at Oxford and Cambridge, and held the living of Radwinter in Essex from 1558 till his death, which happened about the end of 1592. He wrote a "Historical Description of the Island of Britain," published in Hollingshed's Chronicles; and translated the Description of Scotland from Hector Boethius, which is prefixed to Hollingshed's History of Scotland.—G. BL.
HARRISON, William, a writer of talent, who under the auspices of Swift, Henley, and Bolingbroke, after Steele's withdrawal, successfully conducted the fifth volume of the Tatler, was educated at Winchester and New college, Oxford. Swift, who was fond of him, and in the journal to Stella described him as "a pretty little fellow, with a great deal of wit, good sense, and good-nature," who had written "some mighty pretty things," got him appointed secretary to Lord Raby, afterwards earl of Strafford, in the negotiation of the peace of Utrecht. In a letter to Swift from Holland, of December 18, 1712, he details his conduct since his appointment, and complains of being left in great straits for want of regular payment. He returned shortly after with the barrier treaty, fell ill in London, and died there, February 14, 1712-13. The poem of Woodstocke Park, in Dodsley's Collection, and an ode to Marlborough, 1707, printed in Duncombe's Horace, are his chief productions in verse; but several others are to be found in Nichol's select collection.—J. W. F.
HARRISON, William Henry, for a brief period president of the United States, was born in Virginia on the 9th of February, 1773. His father was one of the signers of the declaration of independence, and afterwards governor of Virginia. Educated for the medical profession, the future president entered the army at an early age, and rendered distinguished service in wars with the Indians. In 1801 he was appointed governor of Indiana, then a "territory;" and in the war with the Indians in 1811, and in that with England in 1812-13, he figured as a general. A member of the house of representatives in 1816, and a senator in 1824, he was elected president of the United States in 1840, but lived only a month to enjoy his new honours; dying at the White House on the 4th of April, 1841. He contributed to the Transactions of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, an interesting "Essay on the Aborigines of the Ohio Valley."—F. E.
HARRY, BLIND, or Henry the Minstrel, a Scottish poet, author of the well-known "Life of Sir William Wallace," flourished during the fifteenth century. Scarcely anything is known of his life, except what is given by the historian Major, who states that Henry was a man blind from his birth; that he wrote in popular rhymes—a species of composition in which he was no mean proficient—such stories as were then current among the common people; and that he earned his food and raiment by reciting these stories to the great. The "Life of Wallace," however, was by no means composed exclusively, or even mainly
