Time, Gentlemen

 

   On this day in 1707 four Royal Navy warships sank on the rocks of the Scilly Isles off Cornwall, England. There were many causes for the accident in which almost 2,000 sailers lost their lives: inaccurate  charts, errors in compasses, and bad weather.

   The lost ships were part of a fleet of of twenty-one ships returning to England from a battle in the Mediterranean. Looking at the map, it seems like it would be hard to miss the entrance to the English Channel and stray far north to the Scillies,  but out on the ocean, in the dark, it's hard to know exactly where you are. 

   Finding latitude, your north-south position is not so hard if you can get a sighting of the North Star. Longitude is more difficult and also more crucial as you approach land. If you you know exactly what time it is, you can determine your longitude, but no clock that existed in 1707 could survive life at sea.

  As a result of the Scillies disaster, Parliament offered a £20,000 prize (four million dollars in today's money) for the discovery of a method for determining longitude at sea. A clockmaker named John Harrison took up the challenge and spent the next forty years making a series of clocks until he came up with a model that could go to sea.

   Like many geniuses, Harrison was unable to communicate to others what he was thinking. He was fortunate to obtain the support of the astronomer Edmund Halley who understood that Harrison was on the right track. Harrison's first clock made all kinds of breakthroughs but it was as big as one of those old stereo consoles people used to use as living room coffee tables. 

   His next two models were slightly smaller.  Harrison was now farming out parts of the work to other skilled clockmakers,  and each new model was taking years to complete. Then one day he saw a pocket watch made but another clockmaker that seemed to contain everything he was trying to achieve, thanks to new metals and diamond pivots.

   Harrison's final design took six years to build. It was basically a large pocket watch over five inches across the face. One major advance was being able to have the clock keep running while being rewound, an important feature when trying to keep precise time. Harrison sent his son with the watch on a voyage to Jamaica on a Navy ship to test its accuracy.  The watch lost three minutes over the 81 day voyage, and was accurate to within one nautical mile. This was much better than the 40-60 mile accuracy of previous methods for finding longitude.

   Harrison applied to Parliament for his prize, but Parliament said he had just been lucky and refused to pay. Then the watch went to Barbados's and again proved itself accurate, but Parliament again said, "Just lucky," and confiscated the watch to study it itself. Harrison, now in his seventies started on a fifth watch, but after three years said screw it and appealed to King George III. The king tested the watch himself and pressured Parliament to pay. Parliament grudgingly gave Harrison £8,750.  The full prize has never been awarded to anyone.

   When Jerry Solom was planning to sail to Norway, he taught himself many skills, including navigation. He had GPS, of course, but he also mastered celestial navigation as a back up. He tried to explain to me how his sextant worked. One time at his house he performed the mysterious calculations and determined that we were approximately three miles south of Wannaska, Minnesota. Close enough for a voyage across a life.

Harrison's Sea Watch, with winding crank.