Essential Information
| Location |
Royal Observatory
|
|---|---|
06 Oct 2011
The quote is from a biography of the aritist Thomas Gainsborough by his friend, Captain Philip Thicknesse, and reports the comments of Gainsborough's brother John, known as 'Scheming Jack' because of his wild and somewhat outrageous inventions.There was yet another Gainsborough brother, Humphrey, who achieved some success with both the Royal Society and the Society of Arts for inventions including a drill plough and tide mill, and was remembered by Thicknesse as "one of the most ingenious men that ever lived, and one of the best that ever died". Jack, however, was much more in the mad inventor mould, being chiefly remembered for attempting to fly on copper wings and inventing a self-rocking cradle.
As a deluded inventor and schemer, Jack was, naturally, linked to the search for longitude: he is said to have worked on a timekeeper that he hoped would be effective at sea. Aparently he planned a trip to the East Indies to test his invention but died before embarking. Adrian told me that according to G.W. Fulcher (another Thomas Gainsborough biographer), "though the result did not fully answer his expectations, a sum of money was awarded him for his ingenuity".
In his biography of Thomas, Thicknesse referred to the one time he had met Jack, around 1768 in Sudbury. The family was not well off, and Jack's wife reported that all available money, mostly sent by Thomas, went on "brasswork to discover the longitude". Jack showed Thicknesse his device, who wrote, "I could scarcely detect whether his deranged imagination or his wonderful ingenuity was most to be admired...". Thicknesse went on:
"He informed me that he had visited Mr Harrison with his timepiece, 'But,' said he, 'Harrison made no account of me in my shabby coat, for he had Lords and Dukes with him. After he had shown the Lords that a great motion of the machine would no ways affect its regularity, I whispered to him to give it a gentle motion, Harrison started, and in return whispered me to stay, as he wanted to speak to me after the rest of the company were gone.'"
No more is reported, sadly. Whatever the truth of Harrison's apparent discomfort as a result of Jack Gainsborough's question, and the image of Scheming Jack as a longitude martyr, it is fascinating to catch a glimpse of a rather different Harrison, who entertained the rich and powerful at his showroom and did not care to notice a provincial inventor in a shabby coat.