![]() ![]() ![]() Harrison’s persistence with the problem eventually paid off, and he was awarded a series of grants to continue his fine-tuning of the discovery, which is now recognised to have advanced British seafaring, exploration and the Colonial project considerably. The concept of the navigational timepiece that used celestial markers (moons, stars etc.) to establish time and therefore longitudinal position had been in development for nearly 30 years by this point - the first attempt having been made by the Dutch inventor of the pendulum clock, Christiaan Huygens, in 1673. Spurred on by the promised reward, the self-taught carpenter and clockmaker John Harrison submitted his modification on the marine chronometer in 1730. These rewards weren’t the first of their kind to be offered - Philip II of Spain offered 6000 ducats for the discovery in 1598, and the Netherlands promised 10,000 florins shortly after.Īnswers came eventually in the link between time and space - literally. ![]() Other costs that surely came into consideration by the Board of Longitude in their establishment of the Longitude Rewards in 1714 (handsome sums offered by the Government for a simple solution to the difficulty of establishing a ship’s longitude at sea) were those associated with the transatlantic slave trade, wrecks were common among the vessels as were massive losses of life which to this day remain largely unaccounted for. This, along with errors in charts and poor weather that led to their colliding with the Isles of Scilly, and the loss of 1550 lives. ![]() The most often cited of these losses is the Scilly naval disaster of 1707, which has been directly attributed to sailors being unable to establish their longitude. Naturally this resulted in a great deal of inaccuracy and was hugely costly, voyages were treacherous and shipwrecks common. Sailors were forced to use what was known as ‘dead reckoning’, calculating their current position based on their estimated distance from a previously known point and the speed they were travelling at. On land, a fairly accurate system had developed using the Galilean moons of Jupiter, which were harder to discern at sea. A remarkable figure, he is credited as having invented Geography as it is known today, developed scientific chronology (he accurately dated political events back to the sacking of Troy in 1183 BC), devised the concept of the leap year, calculated the circumference of the Earth exceptionally accurately and, importantly, to have drawn up the first map of the world to use parallels and meridians.Ĭontrary to what these early developments may suggest, longitude remained a problem for nearly two millennia after the work of Erastosthenes and Hipparchus. To begin at the beginning: the system of Latitude and Longitude is first recorded as being proposed by the Greek mathematician, poet and astronomer Erastosthenes in the 3rd Century BC. And yet, their effects are very real: the establishment of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich has given the world the means to measure and to share time - this totally invented point of significance has an objectively visible impact on the real order of the world as we know it. Bisecting the planet from the North Pole to the South (or South to North, but let’s not make this any more complicated than it needs to be!) Longitude 0º could technically be anywhere, with no signifying geographical phenomena to dictate them, meridian lines really could be described as wholly imagined. Longitude is an altogether more slippery character. So, while the idea of it being a line might be imagined, there are physical and celestial phenomena that let us know where the latitudinal boundary line falls. The sun, for example, sets and rises in a matter of minutes over the boundary line between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, the earth’s diameter is slightly wider here on account of the force of its rotation: creating a phenomenon known as the ‘equatorial bulge’ - making the earth an oblate spheroid rather than a sphere as it is commonly known. While the equator might be considered imaginary in the sense that it is not a literal line drawn in the sand, or cleaved in the sea, its physical effects are indisputably real. ![]()
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