A quiz question · medium
How did John Harrison's H4 solve the longitude problem?
The Earth turns 15 degrees an hour, so a reliable clock is a longitude instrument. H4 lost about five seconds in 81 days to Jamaica in 1761-62.
Read the full story →From the story
John Harrison, the Carpenter Whose Sea Watch Solved Longitude and Who Had to Fight Twenty Years to Be Paid John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire carpenter, spent his life building clocks accurate enough to carry longitude to sea. His 1759 watch H4 lost only seconds on a transatlantic trial — meeting the £20,000 Longitude Prize's terms — but the Board of Longitude paid in grudging halves until King George III himself intervened. A copy of H4 guided Captain Cook.
Related questions
- Edward Walter Maunder identified and named the 17th-century solar-activity minimum (1645–1715) that bears his name. He worked closely with the Greenwich computer Annie Scott Dill Russell on the analysis. What happened when they married in 1895?
- What was the Antikythera mechanism designed to do?
- At what UTC time did the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle land in the Sea of Tranquility?
- The English word 'algorithm' derives from the Latinised name of which 9th-century Baghdad mathematician?