Henry Harrison

Henry Harrison

Henry Harrison

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AN APPRECIATION OF HENRY C. HARRISON

June 9, 1946 - May 30, 2024 I first met Henry around 40 years ago when we were both active in the Science Fiction Forum, the oldest continuously operating club at Stony Brook University, whose 17,000 volume library contains over 1,000 books donated by Henry. Later on, we worked together for several years at the Electronics Shop of the Marine Sciences Research Center (now the Instrument Lab of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences but still nicknamed the EShop), so I was privileged to know Henry both as a friend and as a colleague.

Henry James said 'Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.' In my experience, the Henry I knew was first and foremost a kind, generous, and decent human being. Through the years I saw him upset on occasion, frustrated sometimes, even angry once or twice, but I cannot remember a time when he was nasty or mean-spirited to anyone - even to those who might have had it coming.

Henry very much enjoyed sharing his encyclopedic knowledge. He introduced me to the Ashley Book of Knots. To this day I can tie maybe five knots from memory while he knew at least a hundred for all occasions. There are still a couple of monkey fists hanging around the EShop dating from Henry’s tenure there. I know for certain that he made them because after 40 years of trying I still haven’t succeeded in tying one.

Henry loved being outdoors, especially camping and human-powered watercraft. He was a huge fan of the Adirondack Guide Boat, which as he put it was a craft that could be paddled, rowed, or sailed; could be carried by one person; and could then carry that person, two hunters, their gear, and the deer they had just bagged.

Like all true science fiction fans, Henry loved puns, the worse the better. His mother’s house in Locust Valley was surrounded by unusual plantings, including a shrub I believe is called a “trifolate orange.” If you have not encountered it consider yourself lucky because it is the botanical equivalent of razor wire, with about a third of the plant consisting of two inch rapier-sharp thorns. When Henry would come to work scratched up like he had been enclosed in a bag with several feral cats, I knew he had been pruning the shrub of death. He eventually brought in a piece which hangs in the EShop to this very day, with a hangtag labeled “another thorny problem hung up to dry.”

Henry was a talented designer and maker. He was wonderfully creative and imaginative, but also skilled at turning ideas into reality. That creativity and skill supported dozens of scientific research projects at Stony Brook, but none turned out to be more consequential than a collaboration from the late 1980s.

We were preparing to support an expedition to study oceanographic fronts in the western Mediterranean Sea. One fundamental property measured by research vessels is surface salinity. This is accomplished by pumping water from the ocean to a laboratory aboard the ship, and then through an instrument called a thermosalinograph. High accuracy measurements of salinity and temperature are critical to understanding the density differences that drive ocean circulation around the world, so thermosalinographs are very expensive and very sensitive instruments. Unfortunately, air bubbles sucked in with the seawater or generated in the pump or piping can create noise in the signal sufficient to render the readings useless.

In those days, the state of the art for removing bubbles from input seawater was a large head tank, where water is added near the top, bubbles rise to the tank surface, and bubble-free water is drawn off at the bottom. One of several drawbacks to this approach is that mixing in the tank creates a low-pass filter - a quick change in the ocean only presents itself as a slow change at the instrument. This was not a good prospect when the whole idea of the upcoming project was to see how quickly water properties change as the ship crosses oceanic fronts.

As Henry and I pondered this challenge, we realized the problem was the opposite of that solved by cyclonic sawdust separators used in wood shops, where air containing sawdust is spun in a vertical cone, with the sawdust moving to the outside and falling to the bottom and sawdust free air exiting out the top. We decided to try spinning the seawater in a vertical cylinder much smaller than a head tank, forcing the unwanted air to the axis of the cylinder and through a waste outlet at the top center, while drawing bubble-free water from the periphery of the bottom.

We built a prototype from plastic pipe, string, hose clamps, tape, and repurposed office supplies. We had to test it over a sink because it leaked like a sieve - but it worked like gangbusters. The separated air formed an actual tornado on its way to the waste outlet, prompting us both to break out in the Miss Gulch theme from the Wizard of Oz (“na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na, naaaaaa!”). I took the prototype to Spain, also mounting it over a sink in the ship's wet lab, and the results were spectacular.

When I got back, we continued to optimize, eventually putting together a really solid and leak free design. Stony Brook University declined to file for a patent but word of this new gadget got out to the oceanographic community. The phone started to ring and the email started to ding, so we figured out a price and started filling orders.

Thirty-seven years and seven design revisions later, more than 350 vortex debubblers are installed in research vessels around the world, increasing the accuracy of the associated equipment by at least a factor of 10. Many of these vessels operate more than 200 days per year, 24 hours per day, making measurements critical to our understanding of climate change, ocean dynamics, and sea level rise.

Although I recently officially retired from Stony Brook University, the Instrument Lab continues to supply about 20 new debubblers per year to the community. They are now considered essential components of hydrographic flowthrough systems and are actually specified in many new research vessel designs. Not bad results for a couple of science fiction fans sitting at a table full of random PVC fittings from the local plumbing supply house and brainstorming how to do something just a little bit better than it had been done before.

The world is a poorer place without Henry’s big laugh and his big ideas and his encyclopedic memory and his skilled hands and his different way of looking at the world. I wish God’s comfort and healing for his family and friends in this time of loss. I will remember and honor him, and I pray that somewhere he paddles an Adirondack Guide Boat on a moonlit lake to a cabin where the trifolate oranges always prune themselves.

-Tom Wilson, Facebook post