The Navy of the nineteenth century produced two eminent scientists who achieved distinction for their signal contributions to Nautical Science and Astronomy. They were Matthew Fontaine Maury and William Harkness. The former has been accorded all due honor; the latter is yet to be recognized as one of the Navy’s outstanding benefactors. Yet the scientific achievements of William Harkness, Professor of Mathematics, U. S. Navy, were of such consequence as to rival those of the renowned Maury.
William Harkness was one of that now nearly extinct class known as Professors of Mathematics, U. S. Navy, and it is perhaps because he was not in the strictest sense a naval officer that his genius has passed unnoticed by naval historians. The national legislature in 1835 showed a ready willingness to furnish naval officers with good means of education by establishing the office of Professor of Mathematics in the Navy with a salary of twelve hundred dollars and an additional seventy dollars if assigned to teaching at sea. Of this once unique class of seagoing schoolmasters, only three are now on the retired list of the current Navy Register (1952).
William Harkness, Professor of Mathematics, U. S. Navy, inventor, hydrographer, doctor of medicine, astronomer, and meteorologist, was born in Scotland in 1837 and when still a child was taken by his parents to the United States. Little is known about his boyhood except that when only twelve years old he showed great interest in the relatively new science of meteorology. At his home in Fish Kill, New York, the lad carefully recorded observations of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and wind direction and velocity. At the age of nineteen he was graduated from the University of Rochester. For a while he tried newspaper reporting, covering the New York Legislature in 1858 and the Pennsylvania Senate in 1860. Next he turned to the study of medicine and received his degree from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1862. He served as a volunteer surgeon with the Union forces in the Civil War and took part in the Second Battle of Bull Run. In the same year, he was appointed an aide on the staff of the U. S. Naval Observatory. This was the year following Maury’s resignation from the naval service and the Naval Observatory in order to join the Confederacy. In 1863, Harkness was appointed Professor of Mathematics in the Navy with the relative rank of Lieutenant Commander.
Following the Civil War, Harkness directed his attention to the study of the new problem of the behavior of the magnetic compass under the influence of the heavy iron of ironclad ships. In 1865, he received orders to report to the U. S. ironclad Monadnock to further these studies. The monitor was in Philadelphia fitting out for an extended cruise to San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan. Commanded by Commander Bunce, she was to make the first extended sea voyage by a monitor. The cruise of this new type ship offered an opportunity for studying the behavior of the compass in various parts of the world as well as the special problems of the deviation of the compasses of iron ships. Harkness’ orders did not specify the manner in which he was to accomplish this task and the entire planning was left to his own discretion. The ship’s sailing date allowed a mere two weeks to plan the expedition and to procure the necessary instruments.
Harkness mounted on the Monadnock six magnetic compasses of four different types. On top of the iron pilot house on the forward turret he mounted a Ritchie Monitor Compass and directly above it in the pilot house binnacle a Ritchie Liquid Compass. A Sand’s Alidade was mounted over these two on top of the forward pilot house. In the after part of the ship, in another vertical line, a Ritchie Monitor Compass, a Ritchie Liquid Compass, and an Admiralty Standard Compass were mounted.
Harkness’ plan was to swing the ship at anchor at each port of call and to record readings of the compass for each point. He planned to record the horizontal force and inclination at each compass and to trace the position of the dividing line between North and South polarity for each turret. In addition, he would take measurements of magnetic declination, inclination, and horizontal force ashore.
The Monadnock got underway for the cruise, which was to take more than six months, in October, 1865. She put in first at Gosport, Virginia, and then proceeded to St. Thomas, Isle Royal, Ciara, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Sandy Point, Valparaiso, Callao, Payton, Panama, Acapulco, Magdalena Bay, San Diego, and arrived at San Francisco in June, 1866. During this cruise the Monadnock was present at the bombardment of Valparaiso and Callao by the Spanish fleet.
At each port Harkness constructed a tower ashore and determined its azimuth by solar observations. As the ship’s head was swung successively to each point of the compass, a bell was struck and simultaneous readings were taken at each of the six compasses. At the same time, the angle between the ship’s head and the tower was measured at the Admiralty Standard Compass by means of a graduated circle with sights attached. Thus the true bearing of the tower and the angle between it and the ship’s keel were known and the true bearing of the ship’s head and the deviation easily found.
Thousands of observations were recorded from which Harkness prepared his final report. His thorough planning, his careful attention to detail, and his mania for accuracy are evidenced in this report. He carefully separated and noted the readings he considered doubtful because of unfavorable conditions. His voluminous report of the cruise of the Monadnock was published in 1871 by the Smithsonian Institution and was the first of his many scientific papers. It was the most elaborate discussion of behavior of compasses on armored ships which had been made up to that time.
His next important assignment was to observe the total solar eclipse of 1869. For this task he organized an expedition to Des Moines, Iowa. The many technical improvements made by Harkness in the spectroscope and in photographic equipment for this expedition made possible his discovery of the Coronal Line K 1474. The next year he travelled to Sicily to observe the total solar eclipse of December, 1870. For his eclipse expeditions, Admiral Porter, Superintendent of the Naval Academy, loaned the Academy’s fine 7.75 inch refracting telescope built by Alvan Clark.
In 1871, Lieutenant Commander Harkness was appointed one of the original members of the Transit of Venus Commission. These curious phenomena of the passage of the planet across the sun’s disc occur in pairs, the two transits of a pair are separated by only eight years, with more than a century elapsing between the nearest transits of consecutive pairs. The great astronomer Halley in 1716 had carefully pointed out to astronomers the use that could be made of the phenomenon in determining to great exactness the sun’s parallax and consequently its precise distance from the earth as well as other dimensions of the solar system. However, the accuracy of Halley’s method depended on observing precisely the times of contact of the two bodies, and during the ensuing transits of 1761 and 1769 unexpected errors arose which rendered the results practically useless.
More than a century later, in 1871, Harkness began making extensive preparations for observing the next transits of 1874 and 1882. For many years he was occupied in organizing expeditions, in devising and improving measuring instruments, and in discussing results. He took charge himself of the Transit of Venus Expedition to Hobart, Tasmania, in 1874. Extremely accurate results were made possible by his invention of the Spherometer Caliper, the most accurate instrument ever devised for determining the figure of the pivots of astronomical instruments.
Before this time, photographic plates were of little importance in astronomy because of the impossibility of measuring on them the relative positions of the centers of celestial bodies. European scientists had struggled for years with this problem and were on the verge of discarding photography entirely when Harkness invented the required instruments. The work of reducing all observations made by Transit of Venus parties took him more than six years.
In astronomy, Harkness will perhaps best be remembered for his laborious and ingenious research on the subject of solar parallax and its related constants. He conducted a complete inquiry into all previous observations of solar parallax and assigned to each a relative degree of accuracy. Each observation differed in character and principle and from them he deduced a precise value with each different process contributing its just share to the final result. The value of solar parallax recently adopted by the American Nautical Almanac and the almanacs of other nations by international agreement differs from Harkness’ estimate by only 00."05 of arc.
The now universally used theory of the focal curve for defining exactly the color corrections of achromatic telescopes is another of his discoveries.
From 1891 to 1899, Harkness was occupied with building the new Naval Observatory. He devised and mounted new instruments and established a new system of routine observing. For many years, practically every instrument at the observatory, if not actually of his own design, embodied essential features which he had suggested.
In 1894 Professor Harkness was appointed Director of the Naval Observatory and in 1897 assumed the added responsibility of Director of the Nautical Almanac.
Harkness was an indefatigable worker. In one entry in his log of the Monadnock cruise he expresses regret that his officer assistants chose to go ashore after dark rather than work with him through the night. In the pursuit of scientific problems he combined intuitive thought with an unparalleled perseverance that amounted to genius. After studying his numerous scientific papers and reviewing his many accomplishments, one marvels that so much activity could be crowded into one lifetime. He never married, and from this one surmises that he was determined to let nothing, not even home life, stand in the way of his endeavors. He made his home at the Cosmos Club in Washington.
Upon his retirement in 1899, the U. S. Navy in recognition of his work and his 37 years of loyal service, conferred on Harkness the honorary rank of Rear Admiral. His retirement, however, did not signify the end of the scientist’s work. He made plans for conducting independent research at the Naval Observatory but these plans were frustrated by failing health. He died in 1903 from overwork and nervous exhaustion.
In 1903, Professor Frank H. Bigelow, speaking before the Philosophical Society of Washington, of which Harkness had served as the president, said of him: “William Harkness was a man of the highest moral principles, hating sham in science, in society, and in the state, and freely expressing his appreciation of truth as he saw it. He was endowed with a mind of unusual penetration which went to the heart of scientific and social problems with unerring precision, and his memory of details and facts made his suggestions as to their connection with general principles valuable and instructive.”
At the University of Rochester, Harkness is regarded as one of the University’s most distinguished alumni. The University’s Naval Science building, erected for the Naval ROTC, has been appropriately named in his honor. Harkness bequeathed to the university his valuable collection of nautical and scientific instruments as well as his complete nautical library and papers including the manuscript of his report of the cruise of the Monadnock.
The life of Admiral Harkness, in no smaller measure than that of Maury’s, stands as a reminder that it has been not only the commanders in battle who have made our Navy great. Behind those brief moments in battle in which victory was attained there stands many a life time of ceaseless endeavor.