Life and Work
Harris was born in Plymouth on 1 April 1791. His family was well established as solicitors in the town, and he went to Plymouth grammar school. His childhood in the seaport which included the naval dockyard renamed Devonport gave him an enduring interest in ships.
He went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine and qualified as a physician, then returned to Plymouth and set up a medical practice. His interest in the emerging science of electricity led him to invent his improved lightning conductor for ships in 1820. In 1824 he married, and decided to abandon his profession of medicine to concentrate on his studies of electricity. His paper "On the Relative Powers of various Metallic Substances as Conductors of Electricity", read before the Royal Society in 1826, led to him being elected a fellow of the society in 1831. He read papers on the elementary laws of electricity to the Society in 1834, 1836 and 1839, and also sent accounts of his experiments and discoveries to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His experimental investigations into the force of high intensity electricity were published in the Philosophical Transactions of 1834. In 1835 Harris received the Royal Society's Copley Medal for his "Experimental Investigations of the Forces of Electricity of high Intensity".
His work on lightning conductors for ships gained him a government annuity of £300 "in consideration of services in the cultivation of science", and to overcome continued objections to his proposals he published an 1843 work on Thunderstorms, as well as contributing papers to The Nautical Magazine on lightning damage. He was knighted in 1847 after the system had been adopted and shown successful, and was given a grant of £5,000. Though his continued research did not find new discoveries, his manuals of Electricity, Galvanism and Magnetism were published between 1848 and 1856 and went through several editions. When he died in Plymouth on 22 January 1867 he had a Treatise on Frictional Electricity in preparation, and it was published later that year.
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