Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/27

 gout, died suddenly at Winchester House, Chelsea, on 10 Aug. 1734, and was buried in the south aisle of Winchester Cathedral, a little above Bishop Wykeham. The monument to him with a life-size figure of the bishop in pontificalibus is described by Milman as the most finished in the cathedral (Hist. of Winchester, i. 445; the long Latin inscription is reproduced in Historical Account of Winchester, p. 97). By his wife Isabella, who was buried in the north vault of Chelsea church on 26 Nov. 1727 (cf., Chelsea, p. 330), Willis left two sons—John of Chelsea, who married in 1733 the only daughter of Colonel Fielding; and William, who married on 11 Feb. 1744 ‘Miss Read of Bedford Row, with 40,000l.’ (Gent. Mag. 1744, p. 108).

There is an oil-portrait of the bishop by Michael Dahl in the palace at Salisbury, and the engraving of this in mezzotint by J. Simon depicts a handsome man with the mobile face of an orator (, Mezzo Portraits, p. 1126).

[Cassan's Lives of the Bishops of Salisbury, 1824, iii. 202–9, and Lives of the Bishops of Winchester, 1827, ii. 215–22; Nash's Hist. of Worcestershire, ii. 279; Wadham Coll. Registers, ed. Gardiner, p. 339; Wood's Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford, ed. Gutch, p. 274; Le Neve's Fasti Eccl. Anglicanæ, i. 140, 146; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. iv. 103, 4th ser. iv. 480; Nicolson's Epist. Corresp. ed. Nichols, 1789, ii. 477; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. ix. 85; Willis's Cathedrals, ii. 82; Hearne's Collect. ed. Doble, i. 69; Abbey's English Church and its Bishops, 1887, ii. 30; Noble's Continuation of Granger, iii. 76; Bromley's Cat. of Engraved Portraits, p. 273.]  WILLIS, ROBERT (1800–1875), professor of mechanism and archæologist, son of Robert Darling Willis (1760–1821) and grandson of Francis Willis [q. v.], was born in London on 27 Feb. 1800. The tastes that afterwards distinguished him became manifest at a very early age. When a mere lad he was a skilful musician, a good draughtsman, and an eager examiner of every piece of machinery and ancient building that came in his way. In 1819 he patented an improvement on the pedal of the harp, and in 1821 published ‘An Attempt to analyse the Automaton Chess Player’ (London, 1821, 8vo), a mechanical contrivance then being exhibited in London, which ‘had excited the admiration of the curious during a period little short of forty years’ (p. 9). After repeated visits to the exhibition in company with his sister, he was enabled to show that there was ample room for a man of small stature to be concealed within the figure and the box on which he sat, an explanation the truth of which the owner afterwards admitted.

His health was delicate, and he was educated privately till 1821, when he became a pupil of the Rev. Mr. Kidd at King's Lynn. In 1822 he entered into residence at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as a pensioner. He proceeded B.A. in 1826, when he was ninth wrangler. He was elected Frankland fellow of his college in the same year, and foundation fellow in 1829. He was ordained deacon and priest in 1827. After his election to a fellowship he devoted himself to the study of mechanism, selecting at first subjects in which mathematics were blended with animal mechanism, as shown by his papers in the ‘Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society’ ‘On the Vowel Sounds’ (1828) and ‘On the Mechanism of the Larynx’ (1828–9). The last has been accepted by anatomists as containing the true theory of the action of that organ. In 1830 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1837 he succeeded William Farish [q. v.] as Jacksonian professor of applied mechanics at Cambridge, an office which he held till his death. His practical knowledge of carpentry, his inventive genius, and his power of lucid exposition made him a most attractive professor, and his lecture-room was always full. Farish was a man of great originality, whose lectures Willis had attended (as he told the present writer), and when he published his own ‘System of Apparatus for the use of Lecturers and Experimenters in Mechanical Philosophy’ (London, 1851, 4to) he described his predecessor's method of building up a model of a machine before the audience, and gave him full credit for ‘devising a system of mechanical apparatus consisting of the separate parts of which machines are made, so adapted to each other that they might admit of being put together at pleasure in the form of any machine that might be required’ (p. 1). This system, as modernised and perfected by Willis, has been largely adopted both at home and abroad.

In 1837 Willis read a paper ‘On the Teeth of Wheels’ (Trans. Inst. Civ. Eng. ii. 89), with a description of a contrivance called an odontograph, for enabling draughtsmen to find at once the centres from which the two portions of the teeth are to be struck. He was the first to point out the practical advantage of constructing cycloidal toothed wheels in what are called ‘sets’ by using the same generating circle and the same pitch throughout the set, with the result that any two wheels of the set will gear