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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.
Other notable 18th-century English horologists include John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw, who devoted their careers to constructing high-quality chronometers and so-called 'deck watches', smaller versions of the chronometer that could be kept in a pocket.
Horology is commonly used specifically with reference to the mechanical instruments created to keep time: clocks, watches, clockwork, sundials, hourglasses, clepsydras, timers, time recorders, marine chronometers, and atomic clocks are all examples of instruments used to measure time.
John Arnold was the first to design a watch that was both practical and accurate, and also brought the term "chronometer" into use in its modern sense, meaning a precision timekeeper. His technical advances enabled the quantity production of marine chronometers for use on board ships from around 1782.
The term chronometer is also used to describe a marine chronometer used for celestial navigation and determination of longitude. The marine chronometer was invented by John Harrison in 1730. This was the first of a series of chronometers that enabled accurate marine navigation. From then on, an accurate chronometer was essential to open-ocean ...
This timeline of time measurement inventions is a chronological list of particularly important or significant technological inventions relating to timekeeping devices and their inventors, where known. Note: Dates for inventions are often controversial. Sometimes inventions are invented by several inventors around the same time, or may be ...
A clock or chronometer is a device that measures and displays time. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month, and the year. Devices operating on several physical processes have been used over the millennia.
The collection of time data can be done in several ways, depending on study goal and environmental conditions. Time and motion data can be captured with a common stopwatch, a handheld computer or a video recorder. There are a number of dedicated software packages used to turn a palmtop or a handheld PC into a time study device.