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Centuries-Old Longitude Clock Runs Again
douglips writes "BBC News has published a story about John Harrison's H4 chronometer and how it has been wound up for the UK's National Science Week.
After 40 years of work [Harrison] proved in 1764 that a clock could be used to locate a ship's position at sea with extraordinary accuracy." Ah, the GPS system of its day. T. adds: This is the timekeeping device which Dava Sobel wrote about in Longitude .
This site tells much about Harrison's H.4 Timepiece (picture). Don't forget to visit the official site.
I seem to recall some TV show...within the last 2 years, at least, about this clock and the efforts that led to it. Was it based on the book? I think it was on PBS.
Anyone remember this?
Feel free to mod as you see fit.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Pretty interesting concept for its time. Pretty easy to think of if you could see the big picture. But back then, they couldn't. Gotta hand it to Harrison. Good idea.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I saw the special about Harrison and his clock just a few days after I read 'The Theif of Time', arguably one of Pratchett's better books of the aging Discworld series. Not surprisingly, the non-plot themes are somewhat similar... the quest for the perfect material with which to build clock springs.
Reading about this makes me want to read it again.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The interesting thing about the Harrison clocks, is not only were they the GPS of their day, they were also the atomic clocks of their day.
The Harrison clocks, created in the 1700's, are still more accurate than your average digital watch today.
That is what screwed everyone up at the time, because the majority of folks were into heavy metal and wood and so on. Pendulums are messy on ships.
The spinning mechanisms of mechanical watches are much more stable, and this, with the miniaturization, proved to be the key.
The professionals could not deal with a simple "watch" that was the first chronometer.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Test your IQ!
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Longitude the movie was pretty cool, and has been airing on A&E a lot recently late at night...
And you get to see a prop version of the H1 running -- some cool mechanical engineering; even though the first 3 didn't really work on the open sea.
Longitude
Former demonstrations at Antioch
Pluaralism and the Last Century; implications on H.4
This sig intentionally Left Bank.
LIE!!!
Vary the temperature RANDOMLY each day either 10 degrees warmer or 30 degrees colder using a 70:25 random roll.
The lab grade swiss watch Quartz Crystal watch will be VASTY more accurate.
I hate these lies about accuracy.
Even if the quartz watch is not accurate if its drift is known and charted then over a year the watch will win with the corrections reliably applied.
James Burke mentions this in the Connections tv series. A lot of people tried and failed to make a clock accurate at sea.
I wish I could get that series on DVD.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I was in London last November, and visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. I was familiar with the Harrison clocks and story, but I hadn't known they were kept there. So it was a pleasant surprise to find them there. If you're a geek and you happen to be in London, it's well worth your time to go take a look.
The first three clocks are these large (roughtly 1.5 ft in each dimension) contraptions with lots of visible moving parts, wooden gears, etc. Then you get to H4, and it's this elegant little package. The leap between the first three clocks and the fourth is enormous.
There's a fair amount of other neat stuff at Greenwich, too. They have a number of displays about the development of "time infrastructure". I remember reading one bit that talked about how, in 1852 (I believe), Greenwich began transmitting the time to the rest of England via telegraph. I couldn't help but be reminded of how clock signals are distributed around a CPU and other synchronous logic devices, and think that maybe humanity is somewhat more borg-like than we usually acknowledge.
In spite of its appearance, the H4 is a bit too big to really be carried around as a watch.
Chronometer is a better term, since the Harrison clocks (the term used at the time) were specifically built for use at sea, include bi-metal parts to counter the effects of temperature changes, and were designed to run steadily even as the tension in the mainspring changed during the day, or while being wound.
Harrison's sea clocks are a great example of a disruptive technology. His clocks were competing against stellar navigation, and the judging for the award he earned after decades of stonewalling, was done by the royal astronomers. Also - I'm finally posting (my first post!) because for some reason it drove me crazy to read on the main page that it was a clock (singular) that provided a longitudinal position. It takes 2. One set to GMT, the other set to local time, determined by solar noon. The difference provided the longitude. (1 hour = 15 degrees) And it was the ability of H's clocks to keep gmt accurately - (to Jamaica and back!) that made it effective. JGG
Visit the Imperial War Museum!
London has 12 huge museums but the hardest one to get to is the best.
They put the war trophies for American Revolution in basement levels as well as world war one stuff.
I ignore those floors and concentrated on the top two (WWar II and Soviet Cold War).
That museum has stagerring amount of ware hardware trophies and documents and equipment.
A V2 Rocket! with cutaway
A V1 Rocket
2-man german espionage sub
functioning military tall periscopes you can look through
a giant big bertha cannon shell
all sorts of spy equipment
That museum is astounding.
no pictures of any dead people... just technology of war items.
And not too much to anger American visitors. Oddly a "snub offense" of General George Washington exists right across the street from Nelsons Column, and even knowing the inside British joke-offence, I still was proud to see the expensive Washington statue.
I said the AVERAGE digital watch, not lab-grade. Is the watch you are wearing now accurate within 8 seconds in 6 months? Mine certainly isn't. This was documented in a sea trial with one of Harrison's earlier clocks (H1 through H3, I don't recall which at the moment).
There's a surrealistic novel by Umberto Eco about attempts to solve the longitude problem through alchemy and strange "scientific" experiments 120 years before Harrison. It deals with the blury line between science and supersition at that time (not that it's all that clear now), and with the importance of knowing longitude for military advantage and empire building. A very strange story told through the eyes of a clueless young nobelman trapped into an insane voyage of discovery.
Um, it took me to the NOVA web page.
Mod this reply down please.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
True enough, but then at the time the only comparison _were_ watches, even though it is a bit larger. The technology was of the same class, which is why the judges had so much problem with it. They had no way comprehending the technology of a "watch" on steroids
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There are now a number of radio controlled watches on the market. They may not be accurate to eight seconds in six months but every night they tune into WWVB (in the USA, there are european models as well) and set themselves to UTC. If your reception is good they stay within one second of UTC.
burris
(chime head)
No argument about the cost, although the prize money was well worth the effort for John Harrison personally. I still find it amazing that a mechanical clockwork can be so accurate.
Harrison's work was a triumph of craftsmanship, but no Captain could be expected to afford one, unless he came from a very wealthy family indeed. The British government wasn't going to pay for the cost of, an "atomic clock" if you will, in every ship either. In the end, it was producers of cheaper (and inferior) imitations that wound up in the pockets of Captains.
do bot discount the utility of knowing where you are at. the modern stock market came up because bizzes were able to trade and do shit like predict the weather and their upcoming returns.
:when my ship comes in."
Investment in the future used to be a non-rational thing. Due to the cultural and religious shit that was impressed upon your kids, you could count on their supporting you in their old age.
When the advanced navigational techniques of the 16th and 17th centuries were developed, people could predict their futures. They would say,
When my ship comes in sounds antique and slow, because a ship could take 2-3 years between leaving, laden with cargo, and returning, bursting with trade.
But, compared to the generation-long gambles on farms and marriages (the prominent speculations of their time), a ship coming in was as rapid a return on investment as a new technology can be today.
It's great to know where we are - exactly where we are, in physical time in space. I am in awe of it, myself. Place yourself in the proper context of history, and you will know the context of your own experience.
Goat sex free since 2001
Clocks in heavier gravitational fields tick at a slower rate.
Clocks in faster relative motion tick slower.
So:
A clock at the equator ticks slower than a clock at the north pole, because the relative velocity of objects at the equator is higher than those at the poles (the axis of spin) due to earth's rotation, but,
The equator clock will tick faster because it's located farther from the earth's center of mass (due to earth's spin, it bulges a bit in the middle) resulting in slightly lower gravity- and the effects don't always cancel each other out.
So then,
Relativity predicts that atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites will tick faster by about 50 microseconds per day (compared to ground-based clocks), due to the weaker gravitational field in orbit, but,
They also will tick slower by about 7.2 microseconds per day, due to the satellites' orbital velocity.
GPS's designers compensate for this by changing base time rate for the clocks onboard satellite.
Fun facts:
The cesium atomic clocks onboard GPS satellites are accurate to about one nanosecond, and light travels about one foot in one nanosecond. Hence, the best accuracy of GPS is about one foot.
GPS satellites have been used to experimentally verify that light moves at constant speed at all times/locations visited by earth.
And there are other confirmed predictions as well. One other I've heard is that GPS's radio signals experience frequency shift due to earth's gravitational field (photons want top accelerate but can't surpass C, so the acceleration energy increases their frequency) and this had to be compensated for as well.
Time be time.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
If you want to compare high-end modern quartz with a mechanical device, then rebuild the H4 using a modern heat-compensating balance - it'll be a very close competition. Mechanical is more affected by movement and the quartz more by temperature.
I confess I haven't seen the movie. I hope the movie didn't say the first 3 clocks didn't work at sea.
The H1 worked quite well during its sea trial. Harrison could have won the Longitude prize based on the trial of the H1 if he hadn't been such a perfectionist, and declared he could do even better, thus putting off an immediate financial gain. By the time the H2 was ready, there was a change in leadership at the Royal Observatory, now hostile to Harrison's efforts.
(I'm writing this from memory, so I don't remember the details. I believe at least 3 of the clocks were tested at sea, some under conditions intended to make them look bad, such as not being wound consistently.)
...and second of all?
It took over 45 years to develop a watch that kept time accurately at see. And loosing over a second a day of accuracy was considered accurate!
It is amazing to think about the rate at which technology is improving. The changes we see in our life time are clear evidence of an acceleration in the rate at which technology is advancing. It was only since about the time of Jules Verne that technology has begun to change rapidly enough that humans recognize its effect on society. It was this recognition that was necessary to give birth to speculation about the effect of technology on the future, otherwise know as science fiction.
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
Hmmm. Sounds rather like the way pointy-haired bosses today are more impressed with the Lebert A/C units out on the computer room floor than the Sun and HP servers nearby.
They are at the greenwich museum. The early clocks were made mostly of brass so they are big shiny metal things. With enough Lego's you could make your own working copy.
The Museum is in Greenwich England. Its at 51 degrees, 28 minutes 38 seconds north of the Equator but I don't remember what its longitiude is but its close to London.
They don't build 'em like that anymore.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
That is what screwed everyone up at the time, because the majority of folks were into heavy metal
ROCK.
This page widening crap is really getting annoying. Believe it or not, some of us *enjoy* reading /. at -1, and these posts make the page unreadable. Editors should be given the ability to delete these posts. It's not censorship, because these posts are really not speech. They aren't intended to be read, they are intended to make other people's comments unreadable, and that is not acceptable.
Please, stop these crapflooders from ruining everyone's experience.
Mechanical clocks and watches are still hand manufactured by a company in sweeden after 200 years. They are accurate up to 1/10 of a second per week and the spring mechanisms have gotten so advanced that they go for a month without rewinding them. This may not sound so impressive in a large clock, but consider that this is all done in a watch! The only downside is due to the lack of trained watchmakers and the fact that these are all handmade, each watch can run you several thousand dollars! But think of all the money you'd save on batteries.
Pretty interesting, nonetheless.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I've always preferred an analog watch to a digital one. For me you get a much better sense of the passage of time than with a digital. Not to mention they have a charm that you don't often find in a digital.
William F. Libby (american) invented the atomic clock in 1948 and got nobel prize eventually in 1960.
Britain should review why USA took tech lead 1800s and 1900s instead of endlessly glorifying this achievement.
Of the top 100 most vital inventions from 1850 to 1950 only one was a British and 99 were american inventions.
The one Brirish contribution was the Jet Engine, but they had to "give it away for free" to usa military as part of war debt so essentially it is american in a roundabout way.
Britain spends all its BBC documentary dollars reliving its conquest and Imperial domination empire years again and again.
Oh how british: a perfect clock to win a prize that Britain was unwilling to honor as the prize winner...
They should instead study how Americans patented and created the top 99 technological marvels of the years between 1850 and 1950 and quit being maudlin and nostalgic about the British Empire years.
They are a dying irrelevant kingdom of socialist welfare programs.
Oh thats right everything hostile on slashdot is automatically a troll eh? Well then do not COMMENT, do not REPLY but not because this is a troll (its not) but because by requesting you not to reply i prove logically and 'de facto' that this is NOT a TROLL. The definition of a troll is that a troller wants a reply or two. I want no replies I said my piece. Go write your own opinions elsewhere and wuit using your British Mod points to stiffle and censor american Free Speech.
Really? Didn't Harrison perfect a pretty accurate heat compensating (gridiron) pendulum?
In creating his clocks, John Harrison invented the bi-metallic strip, fundamental to most thermostats.
And I would like to have unprotected anal sex with your newsletter.
well, that's not the documentary but its an important episode! Del and Rodney discover H3 (or is it H5) in their garage and sell it for millions of pounds.
The later books are just as wonderful as the earlier works, although the world is getting decidedly more modern.
The DVD *was* available, and may be again as the video is being (re-?)released and available from Amazon (DVD/VHS) and also Blackstar.
insignificant sig
I haven't been able to find a picture of H5 anywhere. Is it still in one piece?
"I want no replies I said my piece"
Would have been a little more admirable if you had sufficient courage of your convictions to post under your own name....
I live about 2 minutes walk from "Merchant Taylor's" the school founded by Harrision.
IIRC from reading Longitude, some of Harrison's earlier models (perhaps as early as H1 or H2) actually performed more than adequately during sea trials. As for certifying the results of the sea trials of Harrison's clocks (and giving Harrison a rather hefty prize), the Board of Longitude never actually did this due to alot of political Chicanery (there were astronomers on the board who favored a Rube Goldberg method of measuring the moons of Jupiter (Saturn?))
A bit of trivia, I was watching My Fair Lady recently and if you remember the foreign accented professional rival of Higgins at the Diplomatic Ball is revealed to be the affected son of a provincial watchmaker who becomes rich. I assumed this was an allusion to the Harrison episode (he eventually did get a huge prize awarded by the King).
It is by coff... er, will, alone I set my mind in motion...
Mechanical watches are made by dozens of companies today, including Swiss Rolex, Omega, IWC and dozens of others, even Swatch. Even Seiko makes mechanicals (although mostly for the Asian market). The Chinese make a bunch of cheap movements and the Russian company Poljot makes an interesting line of affordable watches. Accuracy ranges from +/- 1 second per day on high-end Swiss watches to +/- 20 seconds per day on the Russians. In general anything under +/- 6 seconds per day is considered good. However, there can be a great deal of variation from watch to watch. Rolex, Omega and other mass market companies do little or no hand work in their mass market lines. When you get to a company link JLC, and others, every watch gets some hand fit and finish. However, none of them can be wound only once per month. Most have about a 40 hour power reserve. A few have an 8 day reserve (notably an IWC, and an Eberhard. Of course just about every company offers an automatic watch that is wound by the movement of the wrist through out the day. Those watches should "never" need winding if worn every day or two. Everything you ever wanted to know about mechanical watches can be found at Timezone. Be forewarned, most of these guys think of watches under about $5,000 as "mid priced".
Exactly right. Later on, he also hit on constructing bimetal parts; smaller, easier, and works the same. Unlike a cheap wind-up clock you might buy at Wal-Mart today, Harrison's clocks of 250 years ago were not affected by temperature changes. Quite an accomplishment.
After 40 years of work [Harrison] proved in 1764 that a clock could be used to locate a ship's position at sea with extraordinary accuracy
It didn't prove this, it was already known. The English Crown had a standing award open for whoever could invent an accurate enough clock to make the measurements possible.
Even if the quartz watch is not accurate if its drift is known and charted then over a year the watch will win with the corrections reliably applied
That is the crux of using time for navigation - time piece accuracy is not important, consistancy is. You need a timepeice that has a known correction factor, so you can determine the correct local time. That is why we had the same quartermaster wind the chronometer the same number of times at teh same time every day - to avoid changing the mechanical response of the device - keeping the correction factor the same. We never told time with it, but it was vital when shooting the stars.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The BBC didn't actually make any documentaries about this, the Beeb's liberal bias rarely allows itself to honour any empirical history, I believe a documentary was made by Channel 4, a commercial company.
Btw... it's worth looking at the history of the atomic energy programme before you make such a idiot of yourself.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Computers, radar, music synthesizers, good tv, comedy, music...
Dude, get a life.
Is it Y2K compliant?
I guess we'll never know for sure now.
Lol... funny you should say that :-
:-
:-
According to the US Navy
"In 1958 the Naval Observatory and Britain's National Physical Laboratory published the results of joint experiments that defined the relation between Atomic time and Ephemeris time. (An interesting scientific and philosophical question is whether the relationship between Atomic time and gravitational time remains constant.) Since 1967 the international definition of the second has been based on these joint experiments. Atomic time is kept synchronized with universal time by the addition or subtraction of a leap second whenever necessary."
According to the NPL
"It was Louis Essen's research into the physics of frequency generation and measurement that changed the way the world measures time. In the 1930s he worked on the first quartz oscillator-based clocks and by the 1950's he had devised a caesium atomic-beam tube which could be used as a clock. This led to a better definition of the second using the world's first atomic clock, built at NPL in 1955."
And the Canadians
"A method to replace astronomical observations was urgently sought. The atomic clock, first developed in Britain, was the solution. Scientists at the NRC made a Cesium atomic clock (Cs I) (660528), which went into operation in 1958."
Erm... you don't know your history, anybody worth their scientific salt is aware of Louis Essen :-
"Essen is the only British physicist ever to have been honoured for his contribution to science by both the USA and USSR during the Cold War.
He received the Rabi Award from America and the Popov Medal from the former Soviet Union."
Now... William F. Libby was a brilliant Chemist in his own right, but he didn't invented the Atomic Clock, he created C14 dating (carton dating), he recieved the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960, according to the Nobel Institute.
So ironically you've gone on to prove the very opposite of your insults and suppositions, the Atomic Clock was actually invented in Britain and you quote a Chemist that actually invented something quite different (though still valid).
Get your facts right unless you want to make an idiot of yourself.
Jonathan Betts, curator of horology at the observatory, said the simultaneous running of all four chronometers would not be repeated in the foreseeable future.
"It is a huge privilege; it is one I won't take for granted," he told BBC News Online. "I think it is incredibly exciting. It is a true honour."
Taking your joke at face value, the Harrison clocks are Y2K compliant, just like my Grandma's Anniversary clock, or any cheap analog clock at Wal Mart.
Harrison didn't try to build in any calendar functions; they were simply built to be very accurate 12-hour clocks.
There are some rather interesting antique clocks, usually built for the amusement of royalty, that (tried to) track all kinds of stuff, like moon phases and movement of the planets.
If you dont want people to reply, don't post then (and be a man and put in your user name at least. Surely you're trying to stifle free speech ?
According to a recent tv programme in the UK, a complete prototype Whittle Jet Engine was sent to the US by Churchill as a 'sweetener' to get the US to get involved in the war - it wasnt a debt (the jet engine or 'turbojet' was flying long before the end of the war)
Also, the most massive advances made by the US in the 1940's and 50's (i.e. rocketry) were a direct result of taking personnel from Nazi Germany (Von Brauns rocketry team, responsible for the V1 and V2). You think Sept 11 was bad, the death toll in London and its environs from V1 and V2's was horrendous, yet this man was spirited off the US and is now feted.
Britain spends all its BBC documentary dollars reliving its conquest and Imperial domination empire years again and again.
If you had actually SEEN any British Documentaries (Horizon being a well-known one), you would know that they cover developments and stories across the globe - indeed two of the best recently shown on UK TV were detailed analysis of why the World Trade Center collapsed.
quit using your British Mod points to stiffle and censor american Free Speech.
You really should come and visit us sometime - after all we are the Mother of all Democracies, even including yours I think
plenty of web sites talk about the first atomic clock (NON CESIUM) being invented first by Libby in 1948... before the copycat british versions.
Harrison's "gridiron pendulum" DID compensate for temperature variations very well. He used concepts from this in developing the H4. It's really quite remarkable for its day, when you consider that modern clockmakers don't bother to include this near-250-year-old technology.
There's a reason for that: it makes such a clock terribly expensive. Few people have need for such an accurate chronograph: need does not justify the cost. Really, the only people who have such a need are those who depend on a consistent time source over a long period, typically mariners. Most mariners now receive a time signal from a radio tuned to an atomic clock (which is really all GPS is), so they don't need a consistent chronograph.
H4 is surprisingly accurate, but not nearly as accurate as Harrison's longcase clocks, which varied by less than a second per month, at a time when a "good" chronograph varied by minutes per day.
Also interesting is the carriage house clock which has been running continuously for something like 240 years, having been stopped for cleaning only once and never for repair, and never lubricated.
Harrison's cabinetmaking skills are what led to his ability to make such fantastic clocks: it sounds strange to use wooden gears, but the woods chosen for the gears are extremely durable and self-lubricating.
Ignoring the technological merits of the invention, "The remarkable, unique Harrison clock LIVES".
I read the book, the illustrated version. You should, too. The person who said "The...clock LIES" obviously has never read the book.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
well actually they are unrelated... so british did seem to help on that one thing (cesium atomic clock) I dont think it got a nobel proize though like libby got
Care to cite some examples?
Here is a cached post on google citing history of timepiece technological advancements.
:
I C: www.auburn.edu/~armiswi/time.html+libby+atomic+clo ck+1948&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1
:
Its a good page. It gives credit to Libby gfor first non-cesium atomic clock invention.
goto
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:r1IA97P1TX
and be aware that slashdot will insert a space character in that url citation. YOu need to paste and delete the random space character to get to the page that says
"-Siegmund Rietler built a free-pendulum clock in 1889. It was superseded by 1898's
free-pendulum principle, invented by RJ Rudd. It led to the Shortt clock.
-Henry E. Warren [1872-1957] invented the electric clock in the 1900's
-The wrist watch was invented by Louis Cartier for the aviator Santos Dumont in 1904.
-Alexander Bain and Sir Charles Wheatstone introduced the first electric clocks, whist
master clocks sent a signal every two seconds on two records.
-{The Interstate Commerce Commission created the US time zone boundaries in 1918.}
-In 1921, W. H. Shortt invented the Shortt Free Pendulum, the worlds most accurate
pendulum clock. It was installed in the Edinburgh Observatory.
-In 1928, scientists adopt the term Universal Time for Greenwich Mean Time.
-Scientists invented the quartz crystal clock in 1929. It can keep time within 2/1000
of a second each year.
-Wristwatches became popular in the 1920's using self-winding principles (known for
200 yrs, but not applied).
-In 1934, The US Naval Observatory invented the Photographic Zenith Tube (PZT) that
told time at night by photographing stars crossing the zenith.
*************
-William F. Libby invented the atomic clock in 1948.
**************
-The tuning fork was invented in 1953.
"
there is one web site. There are many others I assume
Clocks below you tick more slowly, and clocks above you tick more quickly. This would be true even in a uniform gravitational field. Of course, the gravitational field around the Earth isn't uniform, so clocks below you tick more and more slowly the more down they are. So, there's a linear change and a nonlinear change. Fortunately, the linear part can be compensated with a constant factor, so it doesn't require much math. Also, the nonlinear part isn't so great as long as you are on the surface, and you can't get the signals in deep mine shafts anyway.
Rolexes are mass produced. Jaeger-LeCoultre, Patek, Blancpain, Audemars Piguet et al are examples of manufacturers that don't churn out watches on an assembly line.
Moderators, learn the difference between a troll and a fish :-)
Each GPS satellite has two cesium and two rubidium atomic clocks on board. Belt, meet Suspenders. Suspenders, meet Belt.
burris
the death toll in London and its environs from V1 and V2's was horrendous
Nah, not really. I mean, one nearly got my mother's family so I shouldn't make light of it, but on average I think each V2 killed one person. Not sure about V1s, but you could hear those coming, or rather, when you stopped hearing them buzz, they were coming.
Normal bombs were much worse - total civilian dead in UK was about 146000. Of course, this is in turn nothing like as bad as Germany - 2.3 million civilian deaths from bombing - 80000 in one night, for example.
Will people be reviving Commodore 64s? I think so. I mean look at the average PC, it doesn't work after one year, the HD is shot, the power supply is dead, the OS is corrupt. The C64 is a true "solid state" machine, you can use it without any electromechanical devices save the keyboard.
Don't mind me, I'm drunk.
A shovel, you say? Daft!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I found this book at the house of a friend last weekend and read the first few chapters. The premise of the book is that even though the continent of Antarctica wasn't 'discovered' until the 19th century and then subsequently mapped later on (using seismology), there exist maps from at least the 16th century that accurately depict the continent, even though orthodox geology maintains that the continent was covered with ice at that time.
The NOVA film you're thinking about is -- "Lost at Sea - The Search For Longitude." It talks about how Harrison had sailed from Portsmouth, England to Bridgetown, Barbados(West Indies). I have the link to that NOVA episode on my personal website. http://www.geocities.com/baddboychris/carib/bb_bas ics.htm
Unfortunantly it appears as though Slashdot may word-wrap the URL so make sure you remove any spaces in the URL.
Of the top 100 most vital inventions from 1850 to 1950 only one was a British and 99 were american inventions.
Really? And your source for this self-aggrandising nonsense is what, exactly?
Britain spends all its BBC documentary dollars reliving its conquest and Imperial domination empire years again and again.
And your evidence for this shite is what, exactly?
Oh how british:
And your anti-British prejudice is caused by what exactly?
They are a dying irrelevant kingdom of socialist welfare programs.
4th largest economy in the world mate, just overtaken France which really *is* a society of socialist welfare programs.
Prejudiced? On the borders of racist, I would hazard.