and completed a course of medical studies at the university of Edinburgh, after which he established himself as a general medical practitioner in Plymouth. On his marriage in 1824 he resolved to abandon his profession on account of its duties interfering too much with his favourite study of electricity. As early as 1820 he had invented a new method of arranging the lightning conductors of ships, the peculiarity of which was that the metal was permanently fixed in the masts and extended throughout the hull; but it was only with great difficulty, and not till nearly thirty years afterwards, that his invention was adopted by the government for the royal navy. In 1826 he read a paper before the Royal Society “On the Relative Powers of various Metallic Substances as Conductors of Electricity,” which led to his being elected a fellow of the society in 1831. Subsequently, in 1834, 1836 and 1839, he read before the society several valuable papers on the elementary laws of electricity, and he also communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh various interesting accounts of his experiments and discoveries in the same field of inquiry. In 1835 he received the Copley gold medal from the Royal Society for his papers on the laws of electricity of high tension, and in 1839 he was chosen to deliver the Bakerian lecture. Meanwhile, although a government commission had recommended the general adoption of his conductors in the royal navy, and the government had granted him an annuity of £300 “in consideration of services in the cultivation of science,” the naval authorities continued to offer various objections to his invention; to aid in removing these he in 1843 published his work on Thunderstorms, and also about the same time contributed a number of papers to the Nautical Magazine illustrative of damage by lightning. His system was actually adopted in the Russian navy before he succeeded in removing the prejudices against it in England, and in 1845 the emperor of Russia, in acknowledgment of his services, presented him with a valuable ring and vase. At length, the efficiency of his system being acknowledged, he received in 1847 the honour of knighthood, and subsequently a grant of £5000. After succeeding in introducing his invention into general use Harris resumed his labours in the field of original research, but as he failed to realize the advances that had been made by the new school of science his application resulted in no discoveries of much value. His manuals of Electricity, Galvanism and Magnetism, published between 1848 and 1856, were, however, written with great clearness, and passed through several editions. He died at Plymouth on the 22nd of January 1867, while having in preparation a Treatise on Frictional Electricity, which was published posthumously in the same year, with a memoir of the author by Charles Tomlinson.
HARRIS, WILLIAM TORREY (1835–1909), American educationist,
was born in North Killingly, Connecticut, on the
10th of September 1835. He studied at Phillips Andover
Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and entered Yale, but left
in his junior year (1857) to accept a position as a teacher of
shorthand in the St Louis, Missouri, public schools. Advancing
through the grades of principal and assistant superintendent,
he was city superintendent of schools from 1867 until 1880. In
1858, under the stimulus of Henry C. Brockmeyer, Harris
became interested in modern German philosophy in general,
and in particular in Hegel, whose works a small group, gathering
about Harris and Brockmeyer, began to study in 1859.
From 1867 to 1893 Harris edited The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy (22 vols.), which was the quarterly organ of the
Philosophical Society founded in 1866. The Philosophical
Society died out before 1874, when Harris founded in St Louis
a Kant Club, which lived for fifteen years. In 1873, with Miss
Susan E. Blow, he established in St Louis the first permanent
public-school kindergarten in America. He represented the
United States Bureau of Education at the International Congress
of Educators at Brussels in 1880. In 1889 he represented
the United States Bureau of Education at the Paris Exposition,
and from 1889 to 1906 was United States commissioner of
education. In 1899 the university of Jena gave him the honorary
degree of Doctor of Philosophy for his work on Hegel. In 1906
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
conferred upon him “as the first man to whom such recognition
for meritorious service is given, the highest retiring allowance
which our rules will allow, an annual income of $3000.” Besides
being a contributor to the magazines and encyclopedias on
educational and philosophical subjects, he wrote An Introduction
to the Study of Philosophy (1889); The Spiritual Sense
of Dante’s Divina Commedia (1889); Hegel’s Logic (1890);
and Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898); and edited
Appleton’s International Education Series and Webster’s International
Dictionary. He died on the 5th of November 1909.
See Henry R. Evans, “A List of the Writings of William Torrey Harris” in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1907, vol. i. (Washington, 1908).
HARRISBURG, the capital of Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and the
county-seat of Dauphin county, on the E. bank of the Susquehanna
river, about 105 m. W. by N. of Philadelphia. Pop.
(1890), 39,385; (1900), 50,167, of whom 2493 were foreign-born
and 4107 were negroes; (1910 census) 64,186. It is served by
the Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia & Reading, the Northern
Central and the Cumberland Valley railways; and the Pennsylvania
canal gives it water communication with the ocean. The
river here is a mile wide, and is ordinarily very shallow and
dotted with islets, but rises from 4 to 6 ft. after a moderate rain;
it is spanned by several bridges.
The city lies for the most part on the E. slope of a hill extending from the river bank, several feet in height, across the Pennsylvania canal to Paxton Creek. Front Street, along the river, is part of a parkway connecting the park system with which the city is encircled. Overlooking it are the finest residences, among them the governor’s mansion. State Street, 120 ft. in width, runs at right angles with Front Street through the business centre of the city, being interrupted by the Capitol Park (about 16 acres). The Capitol,[1] dedicated in 1906, was erected to replace one burned in 1897; it is a fine building, with a dome modelled after St Peter’s at Rome. At the main entrance are bronze doors, decorated in relief with scenes from the state’s history; the floor of the rotunda is of tiles made at Doylestown, in the style of the pottery made by early Moravian settlers, and illustrating the state’s resources; the Senate Chamber and the House Chamber have stained-glass windows by W. B. van Ingen and mural paintings by Edwin A. Abbey, who painted a series, “The Development of the Law,” for the Supreme Court room in the eastern wing and decorated the rotunda. The mural decorations of the south corridor, by W. B. van Ingen, portray the state’s religious sects; those in the north corridor, by John W. Alexander, represent the changes in the physical and material character of the state; and there is a frieze by Miss Violet Oakley, “The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual,” in the governor’s reception room. Two heroic groups of statuary for the building were designed by George Grey Barnard. The state library in the Capitol contains about 150,000 volumes. In the same park is also a monument 105 ft. high erected in
- ↑ For this building the legislature in 1901 appropriated $4,000,000, stipulating that it should be completed before the 1st of January 1907. It was completed by that time, the net expenditure of the building commission being about $3,970,000. Although the legislature had made no provision for furniture and decoration, the state Board of Public Grounds and Buildings (governor, auditor-general and treasurer) undertook to complete the furnishing and decoration of the building within the stipulated time, and paid out for that purpose more than $8,600,000. In May 1906 a new treasurer entered office, who discovered that many items for furniture and decoration were charged twice, once at a normal and again at a remarkably high figure. In 1907 the legislature appointed a committee to investigate the charge of fraud. The committee’s decision was that the Board of Grounds and Buildings was not authorized to let the decorating and furnishing of the state house; that it had illegally authorized certain expenditures; and that architect and contractors had made fraudulent invoices and certificates. Various indictments were found: in the first trial for conspiracy in the making and delivering of furniture the contractor and the former auditor-general, state treasurer and superintendent of public grounds and buildings were convicted and in December 1908 were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined $500 each; in 1910 a suit was brought for the recovery of about $5,000,000 from those responsible.
