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Parliament had offered a large prize (20,000 pounds) for a practical working solution to the problem of determining longitude at sea and set up the Board of Longitude to evaluate submissions. In spite of the success of the H4 trials, where the timepiece was shown to be very accurate and reliable and had enabled the longitude to be accurately ...
A marine chronometer is a precision timepiece that is carried on a ship and employed in the determination of the ship's position by celestial navigation.It is used to determine longitude by comparing Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and the time at the current location found from observations of celestial bodies.
John Harrison (3 April [O.S. 24 March] 1693 – 24 March 1776) was an English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of how to calculate longitude while at sea.
A pendulum clock is a clock that uses a pendulum, a swinging weight, as its timekeeping element. The advantage of a pendulum for timekeeping is that it is an approximate harmonic oscillator : It swings back and forth in a precise time interval dependent on its length, and resists swinging at other rates.
Thomas’s father, Richard Mercer, was a sailmaker, so Thomas had the horological and the nautical in his career ancestry. The Shackleton Chronometer. Thomas moved to Liverpool to continue working as a watchmaker in 1843, and thence to London in 1854, to buy a one-way ticket to the USA, in search of new and better prospects.
The Shortt–Synchronome clock, an electrical driven pendulum clock designed in 1921, was the first clock to be a more accurate timekeeper than the Earth itself. [167] A succession of innovations and discoveries led to the invention of the modern quartz timer. The vacuum tube oscillator was invented in 1912. [168]
A torsion pendulum clock, more commonly known as an anniversary clock or 400-day clock, is a mechanical clock which keeps time with a mechanism called a torsion pendulum. This is a weighted disk or wheel, often a decorative wheel with three or four chrome balls on ornate spokes, suspended by a thin wire or ribbon called a torsion spring (also ...
Huygens' maintaining power in use. The weight drive used by Christiaan Huygens in his early clocks acts as a maintaining power. In this layout, the weight which drives the clock is carried on a pulley and the cord (or chain) supporting the weight is wrapped around the main driving wheel on one side and the rewinding wheel on the other.