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While sailors can readily gauge latitude by the position of the sun or stars, the measurement of longitude bedeviled navigators for centuries, resulting in innumerable shipwrecks and lost fleets. Galileo, Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley searched the moon and stars for help, but their astronomical methods failed. In 1714, England's Parliament offered £20,000 (equivalent to millions of today’s dollars) to anyone who could solve the problem.
A self-educated English clockmaker, John Harrison (1693-1776), found the answer by inventing a chronometer (a friction-free timepiece) impervious to pitch and roll, temperature and humidity. Britain's Board of Longitude, a panel of scientists, naval officers and government officials, favored the scientific approach of astronomers over those of humble "mechanics" like Harrison. But after decades of perseverance, Harrison's approach ultimately triumphed, winning him a portion of the Longitude Prize and enabling Britannia to rule the seas.
The key to calculating accurate longitudinal bearing involved knowing the precise time at both the home port and that of one’s destination. Timepieces of the day were imprecise and subject to failure in the harsh conditions experienced at sea. Between 1730 and 1761, Harrison invented and tested four timekeeping devices (H1, H2, H3 and H4, respectively). They can be seen on display in the National Maritime Museum at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, UK.
In the end, John Harrison's technological talent and entrepreneurial persistence drove the development of a paradigm-changing solution to the greatest scientific problem of his day. Like today's best entrepreneurs, Harrison demonstrated the value of his inventions by conducting a series of trials that proved the merits of his approach. Ultimately, this success had a major impact on navigational techniques that improved the safety of sea travel and won Harrison a significant financial reward for his work.
Textual description courtesy of Reed Business Information, Inc.
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