Harrison, born in 1693 in Lincolnshire, proposed a clock design that would solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. His proposal was vindicated last Thursday, 300 years after he first proposed it.
Guinness World Records confirmed last Thursday that a modern Martin Burgess Clock B, based on Harrison’s 300-year-old design, kept UTC time to the second during a trial that lasted 100 days, just as Harrison predicted when he proposed the design and built a prototype.
Harrison’s contemporaries had ignored and ridiculed his proposal. No one bothered to test his claims or build a clock based on his design.
But in a Twitter message Saturday, the National Maritime Museum confirmed that experts certified last Thursday that a Martin Burgess Clock B based on the design Harrison proposed set a new record for a “mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air.”
The clock kept UTC time to within a quarter of a second, according to the Daily Mail.
“Our 100 day trail of ‘Clock B’ won @GWR for ‘most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air’!”
The clock did not gain or lose more than a second during a 100-day trial in which it was strapped to a pillar at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and monitored against the BT speaking clock and a radio-controlled clock receiving national time signal, The Independent reports.
According to Rory McEvoy, curator of horology at the observatory, Harrison’s design approached a “perfect clock.”
“As soon as we set the clock running it was clear that it was performing incredibly well, so then we got the case sealed because nobody was going to believe how well the clock was running,” said Jonathan Betts of the Antiquarian Horological Society.
But Betts emphasized that although the clock was based on the design concept proposed by Harrison, it was not a replica of Harrison’s prototype.
“It is important to realize his design goes against everything the establishment has claimed is the best throughout history,” he said.
Harrison proposed the revolutionary design in response to the urgent need during the 18th century for a clock that would help sailors determine longitude at sea. The inability of sailors to determine longitude accurately caused many Royal Navy ships to be lost at sea.
So urgent was the need to solve the problem that the Parliament offered a reward of up to £20,000 to anyone who could solve the problem.
The consensus among experts at the time was that the best clock design to keep accurate time would incorporate a heavy pendulum bob with a short swing. Harrison’s claim that a clock with a light pendulum bob and wider swing would keep better time was greeted with ridicule.
“It was a claim that Harrison made and a claim nobody believed because the best clocks of the day couldn’t do better than about a second a week, if they were lucky. So the idea that somebody was going to keep time to an accuracy of a second in a 100 days was preposterous.
“It was only in the 20th century that people thought that Harrison may have been right.”
He also claimed that improved time-keeping accuracy would allow sailors to master the problem of determining longitude at sea.
To determine longitude, sailors at sea need to be able to determine accurately how much time the ship has spent at sea and the local time by observing the position of the sun. Latitude is determined based on the fact that local time is always ahead by an hour for every 15 degrees of longitude east and an hour behind for every 15 degrees of longitude west.
But Harrison’s ideas were ignored by his peers and no one took interest in his proposal until the 20th century.
Despite the rejection of his claims about his ‘longitude’ clock, he also invented a clock that kept sufficiently accurate time permitting British ships to navigate past the Equator.
Harrison, who died in 1776, was the subject of a 2005 bestseller “Longitude,” and a film also titled “Longitude,” starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons.
