John Harrison | Nature

ABSTRACT I TRUST that you will allow an admirer of John Harrison to be a little indignant with your reviewer, “R. A. S”., of Lt.—Comdr. Gould's book (NATURE, March 22, p. 417). “To some

he [Harrison] appears incurably clumsy. His taste for making clocks of wood, his complications, his retrograde inventions like the grasshopper escapement and the gridiron pendulum stand to

his debit”. These are surely strange words for a man who (unless I misinterpret the initials) has been president of the Royal Astronomical Society, in the house of which stands that

exquisite piece of mechanism, the Harrison clock, lovingly restored and enthusiastically described by Mr. E. T. Cottingham (Monthly Notices, R. A. S., lxx. 25, Nov. 1909). Harrison, it must

be remembered, was the son of a carpenter, and brought up to that trade, whence his early clocks with wooden wheels. Harrison taught himself to be a clockmaker, and having a horror of

friction, devised the delicately beautiful grasshopper escapement to be very nearly frictionless. Harrison invented the gridiron compensation, and applied it not only to pendulum-clocks but

also to his first chronometers, to which Graham's mercury compensation was not suitable. Harrison was not alone among inventors in doing things at first in too complicated a way,

learning simplicity by experience. It is common knowledge that most of Harrison's methods were almost immediately discarded—and something the same may be said of Isaac Newton—but it is

extraordinary that any one who has seen the Harrison clock at the Royal Astronomical Society, or his fourth chronometer which won the prize, can call him incurably clumsy and retrograde !

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support SIMILAR CONTENT BEING VIEWED BY OTHERS A LAB-BASED TEST OF THE GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT WITH A MINIATURE CLOCK NETWORK Article Open access 12 August 2023 A SOLAR CYCLE CLOCK FOR

EXTREME SPACE WEATHER Article Open access 08 April 2024 QUANTUM CLOCKS OBSERVE CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM TIME DILATION Article Open access 23 October 2020 Authors * ARTHUR R. HINKS View author

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_Nature_ 113, 570 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/113570c0 Download citation * Issue Date: 19 April 1924 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/113570c0 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Anyone you share the

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