This is a very good story, and is doubtless substantially true; but no watch was ever yet made which has varied as little as five minutes in seven years. Readers may remember that the British government once offered a reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling for the best chronometer, and the prize was awarded to Harrison for a chronometer which varied two minutes in a sailing voyage from England to Jamaica and back.
George Graham died in 1751, aged seventy-six years, universally esteemed as an ornament of his age and country. In Westminster Abbey, among the tombs of poets, philosophers, and statesmen, may be seen the graves of the two clock-makers, master and apprentice, Tompion and Graham.
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.