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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.
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 ...
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.
To determine "longitude by chronometer," a navigator requires a chronometer set to the local time at the Prime Meridian. Local time at the Prime Meridian has historically been called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), but now, due to international sensitivities, has been renamed as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and is known colloquially as "zulu time".
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 ...
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is a 1995 best-selling book by Dava Sobel about John Harrison, an 18th-century clockmaker who created the first clock (chronometer) sufficiently accurate to be used to determine longitude at sea—an important development in navigation.
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 ...
George Graham, FRS (7 July 1673, maybe 1675 [1] – 16 November 1751) was an English clockmaker, inventor, and geophysicist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was born in Kirklinton, Cumberland. [2] A Friend (Quaker) like his mentor Thomas Tompion, Graham left Cumberland in 1688 for London to work with Tompion. He later married Tompion's ...