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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.
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.
Chronometer of Jeremy Thacker c. 1714.. Jeremy Thacker was a possibly apocryphal 18th-century writer and watchmaker, who for a long time was believed to be the first to have coined the word "chronometer" for precise clocks designed to find longitude at sea, though an earlier reference by William Derham has now been found.
After Harrison, the marine timekeeper was reinvented yet again by John Arnold, who, while basing his design on Harrison's most important principles, at the same time simplified it enough for him to produce equally accurate but far less costly marine chronometers in quantity from around 1783. Nonetheless, for many years even towards the end of ...
Devices and methods for keeping time have gradually improved through a series of new inventions, starting with measuring time by continuous processes, such as the flow of liquid in water clocks, to mechanical clocks, and eventually repetitive, oscillatory processes, such as the swing of pendulums. Oscillating timekeepers are used in modern ...
The chronometer, E520, was mounted in a wooden box with gimbals to compensate for the motion of the ship. Flinders went to shore regularly to check the settings of the chronometers against the stars. The Earnshaw chronometer was the only one working at the end of the journey, causing Flinders to refer to it in his book A Voyage to Terra ...
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765, his candidature citation reading "Mr William Harrison of East Street Red Lyon Square, being desirous of the honour of becoming a Member of this Society, Is recommended by us as a Person well skilled in Mechanicks, and several other useful other parts of Mechanical learning, and well known to ...
Burgess was also a leading expert on John Harrison, the 18th-century horologist who built the first ever successful marine timekeeper (the forerunner of the marine chronometer) leading to the possibility of an accurate measurement of longitude. Burgess coined the term sculptural horology in the 1960s.