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Harrison acknowledged ...

_41513078_johnharrison203It's nice to see that John Harrison is finally getting acknowledgement with the dedication of a stone to his memory in Westminster.  He made the first clock to keep accurate time on shipboard and thus solved the problem of how to measure longitude.  His story, and the way his solution was ignored by the scientific establishment was wonderfully told by Dava Sobel.  He was a carpenter, not a member of the scientific establishment.  He thought about the problem in a different way, in a time (sic) where the concept of time itself was distant from our current understanding.  His various clocks can be seen at the Greenwich Maritime Museum in London and its worth the trip down to see it (the best approach being via the Thames from Westminster Pier.

Comments (2)

Mireille Jansma:

John Taylor (no, not that Taylor) has designed a clock in honour of John Harrison. It stars a time eating grasshopper referencing the chronophage and the 'grasshopper escapement' which Harrison invented, and the time is shown by lights, flickering through a greater number of slits than I care to count. Well I did anyway and there are 180. It has been unveiled by Stephen Hawking, cost 1 million pounds and is only accurate every 5 minutes. Which is quite functional as John Taylor wanted to "make timekeeping interesting". See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7625815.stm

I couldn't agree more. I read Dava Sobel's book some years ago, but only recently visited the exhibition at Greenwich. Fascinating.

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