The Clock That Sailed the Sea

The story

Three hundred years ago, the finest sailing ships in the world had a terrifying problem. Out on the open ocean, their captains could not tell exactly where they were. Truly lost, sometimes by hundreds of kilometres. Ships missed the islands they were aiming for, and some struck rocks in the dark and were wrecked, because their captains believed they were somewhere else entirely.

Strangely, what the sailors were missing was not a better map or a bigger telescope. It was a CLOCK.

Here is why. As our round Earth turns, the sun rises on countries one after another, so each place has its own time of day. A navigator who knew the exact time back home could compare it with the sun's time where the ship was, and the difference between those two clocks would reveal how far east or west of home the ship had come. Sailors knew this trick perfectly well. But it only works if you CARRY the time from home with you, ticking faithfully, for months. And the proud clocks of those days, with their swinging pendulums, went to pieces at sea. Waves rocked them, damp rusted them, heat and cold made their metal parts swell and shrink. On a rolling ship, the best clocks in the world drifted useless.

The problem was so serious that the government of Britain announced an enormous prize for whoever could solve it. Many of the greatest minds of the age expected the answer to come from the stars and their complicated tables, and doubted any clock could do it. Then a self-taught craftsman stepped forward.

His name was John Harrison. He had started as a carpenter and taught himself clockmaking so cleverly that his early clocks barely drifted at all. Harrison decided to build the impossible: a clock that could keep true time on a moving ship. His first sea clock took him years, a wonderful machine with balances that rocked in pairs so the waves could not upset them, and it performed well on trial. Harrison was still not satisfied. His second machine had a flaw he discovered himself, and his third took him nearly twenty years and still fell short of the need. Then he changed his mind entirely and made his fourth try small: a large ticking watch that fits in two hands, with fine springs and a large, fast-beating balance so exquisite it hardly cared what the ocean was doing.

That watch sailed across the Atlantic, tossed and rolled for weeks, and once its known steady drift was accounted for, its error on arrival worked out to just a handful of seconds. Yet the prize committee doubted him, and made him prove it again and again. He was paid in grudging pieces. Only when Harrison was an old man, after the king himself took up his cause, did parliament grant him a final great reward. He had given the problem about forty years.

So remember John Harrison, the carpenter who out-built the doubters. Some problems do not fall to the quickest or the grandest. They fall to the one who will not stop.