The land grab
In the 17th and 18th centuries the European superpowers; Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands were racing to conquer the world. They were hell bent on colonising the Americas, Africa and Asia for themselves. The Europeans were engage in a land grab of monumental proportions.
The colonies were dependant on the power of their founder’s navies. It is hard to lay claim to foreign lands if you don’t have the ships to conquer them. All that naval power was, in turn, dependent on navigational prowess. Soldiers and cannons don’t amount to much if you can’t find the place that you have just colonised.
The puzzle of navigation
Working out latitude (the north to south position) of a ship was a straight forward task. Navigators guided ships by the position of the stars and the sun. Longitude (the east to west position) was far more difficult to calculate. Sailors had to rely on dead reckoning. They based their calculations on estimated speed, direction and time travelled. There was no way of recalibrating their position without sighting land.
The difficulties became tragically clear in 1707. Four British war ships returning from a battle with the French in the Mediterranean miscalculated their position. They ran aground near the Scilly Isles. Approximately 1,700 sailors drowned.
In 1714, in an attempt to solve the problem, the British government passed the Longitude Act. The act created a competition with prizes of up to £20,000 (roughly four million pounds today). These would be awarded to anybody who could develop a practical method for determining longitude at sea. The act also set up the Board of Longitude to oversee the awards.
Theory and practice
In theory the problem wasn’t difficult to solve. As the world spins on its axis, the time when the sun rises varies depending on where you are. This morning the sun rose twenty minutes earlier in Norwich in the East of England than it did in Plymouth some 250 miles to the west. So, if you know what the time is at a reference point — say Greenwich in London — and the position of the sun in the sky where you are, it is a straight forward task to calculate your longitude.
Theory and practice are unfortunately never quite the same. The state of the art time piece in the 18th century was a grandfather clock. Grandfather clocks don’t work too well on the high seas. Their pendulums bang about something shocking on the waves.
The clockmaker
A carpenter from Yorkshire, John Harrison, set to work on the problem. Over 40 years he refined and developed a series of “sea clocks and watches”. They became more sophisticated and accurate. His inventions included:
- The grasshopper escapement — an almost frictionless way of realising a clock spring’s power
- The gridiron pendulum — a way of counteracting thermal expansions
- The spring remontoire — a method for evening out a gear train’s movements
Between 1736 and 1761 Harrison submitted 4 different clocks for trial by the Board of Longitude. As his designs improved he was awarded several grants to continue his work, but the final prize eluded him.
In 1761 Harrison’s “sea watch” was tested on a trip from Portsmouth to Kingston in Jamaica on board HMS Deptford. When the ship reached Jamaica, after an 81 day voyage, the watch had lost only 5 seconds, meeting the stipulations of the prize. Yet when the results were made known in London the Longitude Board decided that it could have been luck and demanded another trial.
The results of the second trial (a trip from England to Barbados) were presented to the board in 1765. This time the watch had lost 39 seconds, which equated to ten miles of longitude, also accurate enough to meet the conditions of the prize. Yet once again the board refused to award Harrison the prize he believed to be rightfully his.
The ensuing furore was so great that King George granted Harison an audience. The King tested the watch himself, and after ten weeks of daily observations he concluded that the sea watch had lost just one third of a second a day. King George sided with Harrison and advised him to petition Parliament. He even threatened to go along with him.
Finally in 1773, at the age of 80, Harrison was awarded £8,750 by Parliament. He never received the official prize.
John Harrison died three years later, a wealthy, but presumably bitter old man.
The fly in the ointment
The reason why the Longitude Board refused Harrison his prize had nothing to do with his clock. Every body agreed that it had completed the trial. Its time keeping was second to non. With its help, mariners could calculate longitude both easily and accurately.
The issue was that the Board of Longitude wanted a reproducible solution. They asked that Harrison “make the workings and manufacture of his clock known to the Board and to watchmakers of their choosing, so that copies could be made and tested”. Their aim was to ensure that Harrison’s sea watch could be replicated and used on other vessels.
The only way that Harrison could show that his clock was reproducible was to let the Board of Longitude have the designs. Then let somebody else copy them.
Harrison, for all his technical brilliance wasn’t about to share the technology with others. He didn’t trust them.
The moral of the story…
If you hadn’t guessed it already, is that success isn’t about an individual’s efforts, it is all about their ability to collaborate.
If that was true in the technologically naive 18th century, imagine how important it is today.
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Read the research paper by Tobias Bowman
Photo by David Dibert on Unsplash
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