The Marine Chronometer: Its History and Development

About this book

First published in 1923 this long-awaited edition of the definitive reference work on the marine chronometer contains additional photographs and many of Rupert Goulds later revisions and corrections. It deals comprehensively with the chronometers history and the earliest attempts to measure longitude while including exhaustive discussions and diagrams of the various mechanisms employed with details of their inventors. It is an extraordinary fact that the first machines capable of accurately determining a ships longitude a measurement the great Sir Isaac Newton considered to be a mechanical impossibility were invented and built by an obscure Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison (1693 1776). Amazingly the latter was entirely self-educated and had never served a days apprenticeship to any clockmaker. The Marine Chronometer relates the remarkable story of John Harrisons marine timekeepers which eventually won him a %20 000 reward offered by the British Government for any method of determin