e 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.

In perfecting these amateur clocks he made a beautiful invention, the
principle of which is still employed in other machines besides
clock-