Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/36

  Harris distinguished himself in the presence of the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV) by storming and capturing the village of Merxem. He remained with his battalion in the Low Countries after the peace of 1814, and in May 1815 joined the Duke of Wellington's army. The 2nd battalion 73rd was brigaded with the 2nd battalions 30th and 69th and the 33rd foot, under Sir [q. v.], and suffered heavily at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. At Waterloo Harris was shot through the right shoulder. He returned home with the battalion, and retired soon after on half-pay of the Bourbon regiment. On his retirement the officers of the 73rd presented him with a splendid sword. Harris became a major-general in 1821, and held a staff command in Ireland from May 1823 to June 1825, and commanded the northern district in England from 1825 to July 1828, where he rendered good service in quelling the civil disturbances in the manufacturing districts. He became colonel of the 86th regiment in 1832; colonel of the 73rd foot in 1835, and lieutenant-general in 1837. He was a C.B., K.C.H., and a knight of Wilhelm the Lion in the Netherlands.

In his early years Harris was an expert athlete and swimmer. As a commanding officer he was strict but kind, and appeared to have been liked by his soldiers as well as by his officers. After succeeding to the peerage as second Lord Harris in 1829, he lived in retirement on his estate at Belmont, near Faversham, Kent. He was twice married: first, 17 Oct. 1809, to Eliza Selina Ann, daughter of William Dick, M.D., of Tullymet House, Perthshire, and by her, who died 25 Jan. 1817, had two sons and one daughter; secondly, 28 May 1824, Isabella Handcock, only daughter of Robert Handcock Temple of Waterstown, Westmeath, who survived him, and by whom he had three sons and one daughter. He died at Belmont, after a few days' illness, on 30 May 1845, and was succeeded by his eldest son by his first wife [see, third ].



HARRIS, WILLIAM SNOW (1791–1867), electrician, born at Plymouth on 1 April 1791, was the only son of Thomas Harris, solicitor, by Mary, daughter of William E. Snow, of the same town. After attending Plymouth grammar school he was sent to the university of Edinburgh to study medicine. He commenced as a militia surgeon, and was afterwards a general practitioner in Plymouth. On his marriage in 1824 with Elizabeth Snow, eldest daughter of Richard Thorne of Pilton, near Barnstaple, Devonshire, he abandoned his profession in order to devote himself exclusively to electricity. He had already, in 1820, 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. He was also the inventor of an improved mariner's compass, and to him is due the first idea of a disc electrometer. In December 1826 he communicated to the Royal Society, at the invitation of Sir H. Davy, the president, a valuable paper ‘On the Relative Powers of various Metallic Substances as Conductors of Electricity,’ and in 1831 he was elected a fellow. His papers contributed to the society in 1834, 1836, and 1839, on the elementary laws of electricity, contain his best work. To the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he also became a fellow, he communicated in 1827, 1839, and 1833, various interesting accounts of his experiments and discoveries in electricity and magnetism. In 1835 he was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society, in recognition of the value of his papers on the laws of electricity of high tension. In 1839 he delivered the Bakerian lecture, his subject being ‘Inquiries concerning the Elementary Laws of Electricity.’ Meanwhile, in 1839, the general adoption of his lightning-conductors in the royal navy had been strongly recommended by a mixed naval and scientific commission; and though the naval authorities still continued to offer various objections to his invention, the government in 1841 conferred on him an annuity of 300l., ‘in consideration of services in the cultivation of science.’ Harris met objections to his system by publishing a work on ‘Thunderstorms’ (1843), which failed, however, to attract attention. He also contributed a series of papers on the defence of ships and buildings from lightning to the ‘Nautical Magazine’ for 1834 (published collectively in 1835). He developed his case in letters and pamphlets, which he circulated among persons of influence. His system was employed in the Russian navy long before it was admitted into our own, and in 1845 the czar