Longitude |
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19 July 2026 - Bulle
This weekend I read a biography of John Harrison entitled Longitude by Dava Sobel about the quest to solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea. Harrison was an Englishman chasing the large prize offered by the British Parliament to provide an accurate way to do it using a clock. The competing method was to use the stars. Needless to say astronomers, who were scientists, looked down on the clockmakers, who were mere tradesmen. We take for granted now that we can know the exact time anywhere in the world any time we want, but 300 years ago this was not the case. Clocks back then were mainly run with pendulums, which just did not work on the rolling seas. But Harrison build clocks that used the energy stored in a spring instead. Huge at first, he eventually got them down to a resonable size and passed the test put forward by Parliament. Actually collecting the prize money involved at fair amount of politics though, so it wasn't until toward the end of his life and long after he'd present his solution that he finally collected. Alls well that ends well I suppose.
