Contributions
An Oxford graduate, Thomas Harriot was first the scientific adviser of Walter Ralegh, who employed him as an expert in navigation and cartography. In 1585-1586 he took part in the Roanoke expedition to Virginia, from which he drew "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia" (1588), the first learned description of a North American territory by an Englishman; there he learned the Algonquian language and devised a phonetic alphabet to transcribe it. Passing afterwards under the protection of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, at Syon House, he was able to devote himself to pure science. In July 1609 he drew the Moon as seen through a telescope, several months before Galileo, producing the first astronomical map obtained by telescope. He observed sunspots and the satellites of Jupiter, and independently discovered the law of refraction. A mathematician of genius, he perfected modern symbolic algebraic notation in a body of work he never published.
Significance
Harriot is the greatest English scientist of his time, and perhaps the most unjustly overlooked. His editorial silence — he published almost nothing in his lifetime beyond his Virginia report — deprived science of the recognition due to him and left to others, Galileo foremost, the glory of discoveries he had made first or simultaneously. His notebooks, unearthed and studied only late, reveal a mind of astonishing modernity: in algebra he helped forge the symbolic language that would transform mathematics, and his telescopic astronomical observations precede the Florentine's. Harriot's audacity was also that of a free mind: attached to the intellectual circle of Ralegh and Northumberland, mockingly called the "School of Night" by his detractors, he moved among men suspected of free thought and atheism, and his curiosity about matter and the infinite drew close scrutiny. His Virginia report, finally, remains a precious anthropological document, marked by an attention to Native peoples rare for its age, even as it served a colonial project. Dying of cancer in 1621, Harriot left thousands of manuscript pages that made him, for posterity, a phantom discoverer.
Influence
His telescopic observations of the Moon and Sun and his advances in symbolic algebra, long unpublished, exerted their influence only after his notebooks were unearthed, but his posthumous work ("Artis Analyticae Praxis," 1631) fed seventeenth-century algebra, and his "Briefe and True Report" shaped the English image of the New World. Formed at Oxford, Harriot received his impulse from Walter Ralegh, who opened navigation and colonial adventure to him, and then the patronage of Henry Percy, who gave him the leisure of research; continental mathematics and the astronomical debates of his time, around Copernicus and soon Galileo, directed his work.
Anecdote
On 26 July 1609, in the quiet of Syon House, Harriot turned a modest telescope to the sky and drew the Moon as he saw it: a crescent pricked with shadows and relief. This sketch, the first astronomical drawing ever obtained by telescope, precedes Galileo's famous lunar watercolours by several months. But Harriot drew from it neither treatise nor glory: he filed the sheet among his papers, and the world had to wait nearly four centuries, and the patient study of his notebooks, to learn that an Englishman had looked at the Moon first.