Have you ever heard of John Harrison? Harrison saw a problem and had a driving vision on how to correct it. In the late 1600s, more than 200 years after Columbus reached the New World, there were many ...

Following the Scilly naval disaster of 1707, which lost four British Navy ships and almost 2000 sailors at sea, Parliament decided sailors needed a better navigational tool. The British government ...

Although we rarely think about it now, the greatest scientific challenge of the 17th and 18th centuries was longitude -- determining one's east-west location -- and this conundrum was particularly ...

Developed over decades in the 1700s, Harrison’s clocks were major steps toward a reliable way of calculating longitude at sea Developed over decades in the 1700s, Harrison’s clocks were major steps ...

Down in a basement room of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, history was quietly made one morning last week, witnessed by a dozen experts in horology – the esoteric science of measuring time. Bolted ...

One of the most famous clocks ever built is running again this week - the first time it has done so in over a decade. H4, the marine chronometer that the 18th Century engineer John Harrison ...