Philip Harris Ltd.

Philip Harris Ltd was a British laboratory supply company (part of Philip Harris plc) which became a major supplier of equipment for school science. The brand name is now owned by Findel plc.

The company was originally based in Digbeth, Birmingham, and was started by Thomas Ellis, a surgeon, in 1817. At the time Philip Harris would have been only 15 or 16 years old; he joined Ellis in 1825.

The company traded as a wholesale Chemical Laboratory Company, occupying a site in the Bull Ring until 1889 (when according to their Catalogue of chemical and physical apparatus and chemicals, dated 1889, silver nitrate was selling for 9 shillings per ounce). They moved to 144–146 Edmund Street at some time around the turn of the 20th century.

Philip Harris started as a manufacturer of chemists' and surgical products, adding medicines in 1866. In the 1960s and 1970s, biological and manufacturing units were established at Weston-super-Mare. The main office was latterly at Shenstone near Lichfield. The biological unit, 'Harris Biological Supplies Ltd', traded as South Yorkshire Biological Supplies Ltd until its acquisition by Philip Harris; around October 1965 it was moved from Arundel Street, Sheffield, to Weston-super-Mare.

In the mid-1960s, the company played an important role in developing and supplying equipment for the new Nuffield science courses in England and Wales.[1][2] This innovation continued into the 1980s and 1990s with the development of some of the earliest scientific data-loggers to appear anywhere outside academic research laboratories.

References
  1. Brian E. Woolnough, Physics Teaching in Schools, 1960–85: Of People, Policy, and Power, Studies in Curriculum History 8, London/New York: Falmer, 1988, ISBN 9781850002024, pp. 165–66.
  2. John L. Lewis, "Eric Rogers and the Nuffield Physics Project",, in Brenda Jennison and Jon Ogborn, eds., Wonder and Delight: Essays in Science Education in honour of the life and work of Eric Rogers 1902–1990, Bristol/Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1994, ISBN 9780750303156, pp. 153–62, p. 157; also see Jim Jardine, "Apparatus for the Inquiring Mind", pp. 169–80.
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