Years ago, I was employed by a manufacturing firm that was overflowing with engineers. Manufacturing engineers, design engineers, optical engineers, even a civil engineer; not a day went by that I didn’t have easily a dozen conversations with some of the most highly skilled people with whom it has ever been my pleasure to work. From them I learned a myriad of things – things even today I am still discovering. However even among all these, there was one person who in sheer volume of knowledge, as well as in the ability to apply it, exceeded them all. His name was Rick.
Rick’s job was not very easy to define. He was more or less the firm’s research and development department. Tucked back away, somewhat near the document vaults and the desks of a few lower level drafters, his office was a veritable curiosity shop of partially assembled and alternately disassembled mechanical objects. Day in, day out, he experimented, giving free reign to his remarkable curiosity and creative instincts. Whenever anyone in the firm had a seemingly unsolvable problem with any project, they went to Rick in search of guidance toward a solution. He was, as I called him, the company’s designated smart person.
Designated smart people are curious – in multiple senses of the word – beings. Given sufficient resources and freedom to pursue their passions for solving mysteries, they can be capable of astonishing discoveries. Those who understand this, and find themselves possessed of the economic capacity to take them into their employment can reap great rewards for doing so. The president of the firm of which I write understood this. Decades before him, Abraham Flexner, the founder of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University understood this. And centuries before him, Sir Walter Ralegh understood this, a fact well explained in Robyn Arianrhod’s biography Thomas Harriot; A Life in Science.
Harriot’s remarkable intellectual abilities were noted and identified early by Ralegh, who had the good sense to take him in and support the young man of humble means in an environment where he could develop his mind into that of the extraordinary polymath he subsequently became. From navigation and linguistics to astronomy, physics, and mathematics, Harriot was a pioneer (indeed, even in the field of “pioneering” itself as he was member of Ralegh’s 1585 expedition to Virginia) in a range of fields the mastery of only one of which would today be considered a most noteworthy accomplishment. Which is why it’s all the more astonishing that not only is his name not as well known as that of, say, Galileo, Newton, or Copernicus, it is barely remembered at all outside of academic circles – and perhaps even inside many of those as well.
As Dr. Arianrhod so thoroughly, as well as enthrallingly, explains in this biography – the first complete recounting of Harriot’s life yet published in the nearly four hundred years following his death in 1621 – Harriot really only lacked one noteworthy skill: that of self-promotion. Granted, the process of scientific publishing was not yet established (nor was the idea of “science” itself, for that matter, being still termed natural philosophy) for him to share his discoveries with other like-minded curious individuals; nor perhaps was it desirable in all cases as what he was often discovering, improving, and revising was – such as his navigational work for Ralegh – perhaps best thought of as a trade secret with significant financial benefits accruing to his patron (du jour, as later developments arising from The Gunpowder Plot and other memorable events in the history of his times would have it).
When one considers that – to mention only a few of his accomplishments – Harriot used a telescope to create drawings of the surface of the Moon, deduced the principles of optical refraction as shown in rainbows (prior, it must be added, to Newton’s own work upon this mystery), solved and harnessed the secrets of Mercator’s projection maps using the mathematical concept of circular triangles, and created an entirely new form of much improved notation for the study of algebra, the fact of his nearly being lost to history simply becomes all the more incomprehensible.
Then, of course, there are the more – dare they be called mundane – aspects of his life. In addition to the already mentioned Ralegh, he was also a confidant and designated smart person for Henry Percy, then Duke of Northumberland. His friends and acquaintances included such notable persons as Richard Haklyut and Johannes Kepler, the later of whom sought Harriot’s advice about the subject of optics and astronomy. In 1607 he saw and made observations of a comet – later to be known as Halley’s (although it was Harriot’s notes that were later used by Wilhelm Bessel to compute it’s orbit). And he apparently attended the theater, in at least one case jotting down in the margins of a paper on which he was working a few lines he seems to have found significant from a play by some then contemporary playwright named Shakespeare.
The story of Thomas Harriot’s life and works, was it not so well documented by such a respected scholar as Dr. Arianrhod, could easily be thought a work of pure fiction – and extravagant, scarcely believable fiction at that. Yet it is all true. Indeed, as most of his work was unpublished by him, and some of his most significant work, such as his Arcticon, has been lost entirely, it is indeed possible that what is now available to us is actually an under-representation of the true, seemingly unfathomable, breadth and scope of this man’s remarkable mind. That Dr. Arianrhod has devoted the time and effort in bringing him back to us through this absolutely captivating biography is something for which we should all be deeply grateful, and in similar gratitude, we owe it to the memory, indeed, the unrelentingly curious and inquiring spirit, of Thomas Harriot himself, to read it.
Title: Thomas Harriot; A Life in Science
Author: Robyn Arianrhod
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 376 pp., with 27 b/w images and figures
ISBN: 9780190271855
Published: May 2019
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
