Longitude
by Dava Sobel · 1 Jan 1995 · 128pp · 38,963 words
naming a prize equal to a king’s ransom (several million dollars in today’s currency) for a “Practicable and Useful” means of determining longitude. English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who pioneered the science of portable precision timekeeping, devoted his life to this quest. He accomplished what Newton had feared was
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of 1714, in which Parliament promised a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the longitude problem. In 1736, an unknown clockmaker named John Harrison carried a promising possibility on a trial voyage to Lisbon aboard H.M.S. Centurion. The ship’s officers saw firsthand how Harrison’s clock
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well As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison. —LORD BYRON, “Don Juan” So little is known of the early life of John Harrison that his biographers have had to spin the few thin facts into whole cloth. These highlights, however, recall such stirring elements in the lives of
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, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns, and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only
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manuscript copy of a lecture series on natural philosophy delivered by mathematician Nicholas Saunderson at Cambridge University. By the time this book reached his hands, John Harrison had already mastered reading and writing. He applied both skills to Saunderson’s work, making his own annotated copy, which he headed “Mr. Saunderson’
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the next several years. The handwriting throughout appears neat and small and regular, as one might expect from a man of methodical mind. Although John Harrison forswore Shakespeare, never allowing the Bard’s works in his house, Newton’s Principia and Saunderson’s lectures stood him in good stead for the
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—now occupy an exhibit case at The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers’ one-room museum at Guildhall in London. Aside from the fact that the great John Harrison built it, the clock claims uniqueness for another singular feature: It is constructed almost entirely of wood. This is a carpenter’s clock, with
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brothers built two long-case, or grandfather, clocks. James Harrison signed them both in bold script right on their painted wood faces. The name John Harrison does not appear anywhere, outside or inside, though there is not a horologist in the world who doubts that John was the designer and driving
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two hundred miles—to lay his plan before the Board of Longitude. 8. The Grass hopper Goes to Sea Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude? —CHRISTOPHER FRY, The Lady’s Not for Burning When John Harrison arrived in London in the summer of 1730, the Board
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wonderful sea clock—not to the Board of Longitude but to the Royal Society, who gave it a hero’s welcome. Concurring with Dr. Halley and three other equally impressed Fellows of the Society, Graham wrote this endorsement of H-1 and its maker: John Harrison, having with great labour and expense, contrived
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the weather was clear, that is. If clouds appeared, the clock hid behind them. The clock of heaven formed John Harrison’s chief competition for the longitude prize; the lunar distance method for finding longitude, based on measuring the motions of the moon, constituted the only reasonable alternative to Harrison’s timekeepers. By a
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couple of weeks past New Year’s Day in January 1742. The inauguration of the new astronomer royal presaged a drastic reversal of fortune for John Harrison, whom Halley had always admired. Bradley, despite his 1735 endorsement of the sea clock, felt little affinity for anything outside astronomy. Bradley had distinguished
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efforts of the many contributors to this large-scale international enterprise. In comparison, John Harrison offered the world a little ticking thing in a box. Preposterous! Worse, this device of Harrison’s had all the complexity of the longitude problem already hardwired into its works. The user didn’t have to master math
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was arguably ten years from the decision to put a man on the moon to the successful landing of the Apollo lunar module. It took John Harrison nineteen years to build H-3. Historians and biographers cannot explain why Harrison—who turned out a turret clock in two years flat when
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in the manner of a property deed. Nevertheless, William was duly elected to membership in his own right in 1765. This sole surviving son of John Harrison took up his father’s cause. Though a child when the work on the sea clocks began, William passed through his teens and twenties in
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with the Board of Longitude. As for the challenge of H-3, which contains 753 separate parts, the Harrisons seem to have taken it in stride. They never cursed the instrument or rued its long rule over their lives. In a retrospective review of his career milestones, John Harrison wrote of H-3
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of flutings and flourishes. The designs serve no functional purpose other than to dazzle the beholder. A bold signature near the plate’s perimeter reads “John Harrison & Son A.D. 1759.” And under the plate, among the spinning wheels, diamonds and rubies do battle against friction. These tiny jewels, exquisitely cut,
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is more an antihero than a villain, probably more hardheaded than hardhearted. But John Harrison hated him with a passion, and with good reason. The tension between these two men turned the last stretch of the quest for the longitude prize into a pitched battle. Maskelyne took up, then embraced, then came to
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in 1765. The fourth in a long line of Nevils, Maskelyne was born on October 5, 1732. This made him about forty years younger than John Harrison, although he seemed never to have been young. Described by a biographer early on as “rather a swot” and “a bit of a prig,”
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his older brothers, William and Edmund, as “Billy” and “Mun,” and call his younger sister, Margaret, “Peggy,” but Nevil was always and only Nevil. Unlike John Harrison, who had no formal education, Nevil Maskelyne attended Westminster School and Cambridge University. He worked his way through college, performing menial tasks in exchange for
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with the heavy sea clock, H-3, from London to the port of Portsmouth, where he had orders to wait for a ship assignment. John Harrison, fussing and fine-tuning H-4 till the very last minute, planned to meet William at Portsmouth and deliver the portable timekeeper into his hands
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. At this juncture, Digges made Harrison a new offer: He would buy the first longitude timekeeper that William and his father put up for sale, the moment it became available. While still in Madeira, Digges wrote to John Harrison: “Dear Sir, I have just time to acquaint you . . . of the great perfection
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adjusted total error, outbound and homebound combined, amounted to just under two minutes. The prize should have gone to John Harrison then and there, for his Watch had done all that the Longitude Act demanded, but events conspired against him and withheld the funds from his deserving hands. First there was the evaluation
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of the Watch have not been sufficient to determine the Longitude at Sea.” H-4 must needs submit to a new trial, under stricter scrutiny. Back to the West Indies with it, and better luck next time. Instead of £20,000, John Harrison received £1,500, in recognition of the fact that
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the taking of lunars. The Watch might even stand in for the lunars in foul weather, when the moon and stars disappeared. Then, too, John Harrison wasn’t getting any younger. What if he died and took the potentially useful secret to the grave with him? What if William and the
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doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock; My thoughts are minutes. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II Two compelling likenesses of John Harrison, both made during his lifetime, survive into ours. The first is a formal portrait in oils by Thomas King, completed sometime between October 1765 and
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it to find Maskelyne, unannounced, carrying a warrant for the arrest of the sea clocks. “Mr. John Harrison,” this missive begins, “We the . . . Commissioners appointed by the Acts of Parliament for the discovery of the Longitude at Sea, do hereby require you to deliver up to the Rev. Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal at
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to carry out scientific experiments and explorations. He also conducted field tests for the Board of Longitude, comparing the lunar distance method, which Cook was mariner enough to master, with several new sea clocks modeled after John Harrison’s marvelous timekeeper. “I must here take note,” Cook wrote in his journal of the
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Genius The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. —W. H. AUDEN, “Song” When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day after his birth in 1693, he held martyr status among clockmakers. For decades
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ships on all seven seas, it owned close to eight hundred chronometers. Clearly, this was an idea whose time had come. The infinite practicality of John Harrison’s approach had been demonstrated so thoroughly that its once formidable competition simply disappeared. Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken
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an interval of 165 years.” Thanks to Gould’s efforts, the clock is still going now, in the observatory gallery. The restored time-pieces constitute John Harrison’s enduring memorial, just as St. Paul’s Cathedral serves as monument to Christopher Wren. Although Harrison’s actual remains are entombed some miles northwest
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as the true time but also as a ship at sea, sailing mile after nautical mile over the bounding time zones. With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link points on the three-dimensional
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Dutton, Benjamin. Navigation and Nautical Astronomy. Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1951. Earnshaw, Thomas. Longitude: An Appeal to the Public. London: 1808; rpt. British Horological Institute, 1986. Espinasse, Margaret. Robert Hooke. London: Heinemann, 1956. Gould, Rupert T. John Harrison and His Timekeepers. London: National Maritime Museum, 1978. (Reprinted from The Mariner’s Mirror
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, Vol. XXI, No. 2, April 1935.) —. The Marine Chronometer. London: J. D. Potter, 1923; rpt. Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989. Heaps, Leo. Log of the Centurion. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Hobden, Heather, and Hobden, Mervyn. John Harrison and
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in Time. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Laycock, William. The Lost Science of John “Longitude” Harrison. Kent, England: Brant Wright, 1976. Macey, Samuel L., ed. Encyclopedia of Time. New York: Garland, 1994. May, W. E. “How the Chronometer Went
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Pack, S. W. C. Admiral Lord Anson. London: Cassell, 1960. Quill, Humphrey. John Harrison, the Man Who Found Longitude. London: Baker, 1966. —. John Harrison, Copley Medalist, and the £20,000 Longitude Prize. Sussex: Antiquarian Horological Society, 1976. Randall, Anthony G. The Technology of John Harrison’s Portable Timekeepers. Sussex: Antiquarian Horological Society, 1989. Vaughn, Denys, ed. The Royal
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Society and the Fourth Dimension: The History of Timekeeping. Sussex: Antiquarian Horological Society, 1993. Whittle, Eric S. The Inventor of the Marine Chronometer: John Harrison of
Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ...
by David Barrie · 12 May 2014 · 366pp · 100,602 words
the moon. In practice, however, the two techniques were to be mutually dependent for many years to come. THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY of the development by John Harrison (1693–1776) of the first accurate shipboard timekeeper—and his long struggle for official recognition of his feat—is by now well-known. In 1759
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(4th ed.). Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. Norie, J. W. (1839). A Complete Epitome of Practical Navigation. London: J. W. Norie. Quill, H. (1966). John Harrison: The Man Who Found Longitude. London: John Baker. Raban, J. (2000). Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. London: Picador Raper, L. H. (1840). The Practice of
About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney · 16 Aug 2021 · 306pp · 84,649 words
of the world’s most remarkable collections of precision clocks and watches. Three days a week, I wound the celebrated marine timekeepers made by John “Longitude” Harrison and helped look after the observatory’s time ball and its pioneering Victorian electrical time network. And I volunteered every month at Belmont, a
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).2 He was writing about what made nations rich, and his book The Wealth of Nations was published on March 9, 1776. Fifteen days later, John Harrison died, having invented the marine chronometer. Southern Africa was one of so many places in the world where the maritime expansion of Western empires was
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planted their flag on the Cape, the best navigational technology meant marine chronometers, highly accurate timekeepers first developed by John Harrison in the 1750s, that offered a fixed time reference from which longitude could be calculated once at sea. Crucial to the process of chronometer navigation was access to accurate time signals during
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an act founding a Board of Longitude that offered £20,000 to anybody who could solve the problem to half a degree. It took half a century for the British prize fund to bear fruit, and then it did so twice. By the late 1750s, John Harrison had completed a mechanical timekeeper (later
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in a suburb of Munich became the first atomic clocks in space. CLOCKS HAD EXISTED at the very heart of navigation since the 1750s, when John Harrison’s marine timekeepers first proved that timekeeping technology, combined with astronomical observations, offered a powerful way for military and merchant navies to find their location
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much more rugged to keep ticking without fail for years on end as the satellites orbited Earth. It was like the eighteenth-century longitude problem all over again. Then, John Harrison had to find ways to miniaturize existing timekeeping technology while also increasing its accuracy, precision and long-term reliability. At the same
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester · 7 May 2018 · 449pp · 129,511 words
,” as he was widely known, had predecessors who can lay near-equal claim to parenthood. One of them was a luckless clockmaker from Yorkshire named John Harrison, who worked just a few decades earlier to create devices that kept near-perfect time; the other, rather unexpectedly to those who suppose precision to
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the Yorkshire carpenter and joiner who later became England’s, perhaps the world’s, most revered horologist: John Harrison, the man who most famously gave mariners a sure means of determining a vessel’s longitude. This he did by painstakingly constructing a family of extraordinarily precise clocks and watches, each accurate to just
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set up in London in 1714, and a prize of twenty thousand pounds offered to anyone who could determine longitude with an accuracy of thirty miles. It was John Harrison who, eventually and after a lifetime of heroic work on five timekeeper designs, would claim the bulk of the prize. Harrison’s legacy
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Oxford,* as an untouched testament to its maker’s art. And what sublime pieces of mechanical art John Harrison made! By the time he decided to throw his hat in the ring for the longitude prize, he had already constructed a number of fine and highly accurate timekeepers—most of them pendulum clocks
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the more delicate parts of the watches: the notion that such work could possibly be done by the hand of a sixty-six-year-old John Harrison still beggars belief. Once his task was completed, he handed the finished watch over to the Admiralty for its crucial test. The instrument (in the
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for a seaborne timekeeping instrument. And while it would be agreeable to report that John Harrison then won the prize for his marvelous creation, much has been made of the fact that he did not. The Board of Longitude prevaricated for years, the Astronomer Royal of the day declaring that a much better
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way of determining longitude, known as the lunar distance method, was being perfected, and that there was therefore no need for sea clocks to be made. Poor John Harrison, therefore, had to visit King George III (a great admirer, as it happens
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remarkable and precise in its making and aspect, but its inaccuracy and understandably amateurish construction rendered it unreliable and, in practical terms, well-nigh useless. John Harrison’s timekeepers, though, were both precise and accurate, but given that they took years to make and perfect, and were the result of hugely costly
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or as the fountainhead for true and world-changing precision. Also, though intending no disrespect to an indelible technical achievement, it is worth noting that John Harrison’s clockworks enjoyed perhaps only three centuries’ worth of practical usefulness. Nowadays, the brassbound chronometer in a ship’s chart room, just like the sextant
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for their precautionary value only: if the seagoing vessel loses all power, or if the master is a purist with a disdain for technology, then John Harrison’s works have real practical worth. Otherwise, his clocks gather dust and salt, or are kept in glass cases, and his name will begin to
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precise artifact to be made again and again with comparative ease and at a reasonable frequency and cost. Any true and knowledgeable craftsman (just like John Harrison) may be able, if equipped with sufficient skill, ample time, and tools and material of quality, to make one thing of elegance and evident precision
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heavy hunks of iron. A further link can be made, between the thus gun-connected Wilkinson and Watt on the one hand and the clockmaker John Harrison on the other, as it will be remembered that Harrison’s early sea clock trials were made on Royal Naval warships of the day, warships
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the scientific instruments in his workshop in Glasgow, he became well-nigh immured by his passion for exactitude, to much the same degree as had John Harrison in his clock-making workshop in Lincolnshire. Watt was quite familiar with the early dividing engines and screw thread cutters and lathes and other instruments
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lathe. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1775, Jesse Ramsden, a scientific instrument maker in Yorkshire who was funded by the same Board of Longitude for which the clockmaker John Harrison had labored, and who was not allowed to patent his invention, had made a small and exquisite screw-cutting lathe. This could cut
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, and around which ropes would be threaded. The sheaves themselves were often made of Lignum vitae, the very same hard and self-lubricating wood that John Harrison used for the gear trains of some of his clocks: most modern blocks have aluminum or steel sheaves and are themselves made of metal, except
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entirely exact. An engineer’s need for a standard plane surface is much the same as a navigator’s need for a precise timekeeper, as John Harrison’s, or a surveyor’s need for a precise meridian, such as that drawn in Ohio in 1786 to start the proper mapping of the
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, the peal of church bells. Clocks of the kind being made in America, necessarily very different from the kind of timekeepers John Harrison had been making for the Board of Longitude in England in the previous century, were offered as symbols of arrival into the middle class, much as were sewing machines and
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vision for GPS was very much a military one, while Easton, more poetically, thought of the system as a natural successor to John Harrison’s eighteenth-century work on both longitude and highly accurate clocks. There were technical problems aplenty for the proposed system, and so the constellation of satellites needed for the
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Armory (Va.), 98, 99, 102, 161n Harrison, John, 24, 30–37, 47, 67, 105, 267n balance mechanisms in clocks made by, 33, 35 Board of Longitude prize and, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35–36 large pendulum clocks made by (H1, H2, and H3), 30–31, 32–34, 35 restoration of clocks
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allowing aircraft “to drop five bombs in the same hole.” Roger Easton, by contrast, liked to think of his work as the poetic continuation of John Harrison’s timekeeping obsession of two centuries before, though linking time and space with modern technology. * Many of the major achievements of nineteenth-century cartography, when
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton · 7 Dec 2015 · 1,197pp · 304,245 words
a timepiece had to remain accurate despite changes in temperature and humidity, and despite the movement of the waves. The problem was not solved until John Harrison produced the first reliable marine chronometer in 1735.18 Were the discoveries of Galileo, Hooke and Huygens irrelevant? Certainly not, but they were insufficient. It
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
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moisture, cold, heat, salt, gravity, and tumult.68 Quite a task. Not until 1759, after thirty years of effort, did a provincial English craftsman named John Harrison manage to implement Gemma’s proposal. Harrison undertook the project not out of enthusiasm for a challenge or concern for his shipwrecked countrymen but because
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, or telling your navigator you want to go to Fort Worth, Texas, but getting dropped in Dallas. John Harrison fashioned not just one but several chronometers, whose accuracy exceeded the most stringent demand of the Longitude Act. The first, completed in 1735 and known as H-1, was an intricate brass tabletop contrivance
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, claimed some chilly islands for Britain, and charted regions of the South Pacific so accurately that twentieth-century mariners continued to depend on his findings. John Harrison died in 1776, but even before he was laid to rest, a skilled assistant had begun to make knock-offs of H-4: the cheaper
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt · 6 Jul 2011 · 595pp · 162,258 words
up a competition that offered a prize of £20,000 to anyone who could determine longitude on board ship to within thirty nautical miles of accuracy. Famously a man called John Harrison, who had built his first clock in 1713 at the age of twenty, dedicated himself to the chronometer method of overcoming
The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
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a single meeting – they merely sent out letters of rejection. But they also kept inviting proposals. More than twenty years after the prize was established, John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker from a small town in Yorkshire, stepped forward with the design for a seaworthy timepiece. Of all the people working on
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
of twenty thousand pounds, offered by the British Board of Longitude to anyone who could devise a practicable method of determining longitude on a transatlantic crossing to within one-half a degree, which equals sixty-three nautical miles at the latitude of London. John Harrison, an uneducated carpenter turned clock-maker, pursued the prize
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the distance from the earth to the sun—the “astronomical unit.” Time: 1765 Noteworthy Events: John Harrison is acknowledged by the English Board of Longitude to have developed the marine chronometer, making possible accurate timekeeping and the determination of longitude at sea. Time: 1766 Noteworthy Events: Henry Cavendish identifies hydrogen, the most abundant element
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: A Life. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Gottfried, Kurt, and Victor F. Weisskopf. Concepts of Particle Physics. London: Oxford University Press, 1984. Gould, Rupert T. John Harrison and His Timekeepers. Greenwich, Eng.: National Maritime Museum, 1987. Graham, Loren R. Between Science and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Grant, Edward. In
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the global transit of Venus observations was seen as a way to fine-tune lunar distance. But it was ultimately the horological solution that prevailed. John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker, developed an ocean-hardened chronometer he called H4. The first reproduction of H4 was carried on Cook’s second Pacific voyage
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