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John Harrison: Inventor and Longitude Hero
szczys writes: Here's an interesting fact: when at sea you can't establish your longitude without a reliable clock. You can figure out latitude with a sextant, but not longitude. Early clocks used pendulums that don't work on a rocking boat. So in the 1700s the British government offered up £20,000 for a reliable clock that would work at sea. John Harrison designed a really accurate ocean-worthy clock after 31 years of effort and was snubbed for the prize which would be £2.8 Million at today's value. After fighting for the payout for another 36 years he did finally get it at the ripe old age of 80. The methods he used to build this maritime chronometer were core to every wrist and pocket watch through the first third of the 20th Century. One of his timepieces, designated Clock B, was declared by Guinness to be the world's most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air' more than 250 years after it was designed.
GPS relies on clocks, but it's still not true.
You can use any fixed point of reference and triangulation to determine longitude.
You just can't use the stars or the sun because the Earth rotates and you'd need to now what time it was in order to know what their position would be.
You can use just about any continent or any large island if you have accurate maps.
You can also use the moon if you carefully watch it change to its fullest or wait for the tiniest sliver to vanish, for example. The phases of the moon serve as your clock. Hard to accurately measure, but if you're stuck at sea with nothing else to do you it can change being 1000 miles off course to being 100 miles off course.
It isn't easy, but it's one of the many ways ancient navigators navigated. We're talking about clocks in the 1700s, yet by that time voyages to the new world were getting to be fairly routine. Accurate maps, measuring speed (with the knot method for example), learning the currents and weather patterns, etc. made such voyages possible. Clocks made it easy enough for the Brits to send everyone and their dog over on anything that would float.
It was far too expensive to practically manufacture in the day.
It was expensive, but not too expensive. Ships were also expensive. Entire fleets of warships and the upkeep of the sailors and marines even more so.
But, it was not an open society, and monarchies can change the rules on a whim.
You know you're exactly back to front? The government through the longitude commission kept on changing the rules. The king weighed in and convinced them to stick to the rules. So it was actually the monarchy keeping the government honest.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Aaah excellent more maker hate from randos on the internet. I don't get the sheer level of vitriol aimed at people who instead of sitting on their arses watching TV or whining on the internet actually get up and do something with their time. Jealousy, perhaps?
GP does come across as unnecessarily insulting. That's not a justification for ad hominem in return, though.
A few things:
(1) There *IS* a significant difference between the modern "maker" and the traditional "craftsman." In general, the sense I get of the maker movement is that it does not focus on specialization -- rather on general familiarity with a wide variety of tools, equipment, and approaches. This is quite different from a traditional craftsman, who might spend years apprenticing to learn a specific subset of skills, then decades perfecting those skills. One cannot compare a "maker" who learned how to use a power saw last week to help with his random electronics project that has a wood frame with a carpenter who has been doing complex woodworking for 25 years. I think that's kinda the point GP was making, even if it was expressed poorly. And it's a legitimate point.
(2) Of the few self-identified "makers" I've conversed with for any period of time, most of them have in fact come across as pretentious dilettantes who don't really know much of anything about traditional crafts. Yet they act like all of their knowledge is so powerful and deep. I'm not claiming my sample is representative, but it is what I've observed.
(3) I have absolutely nothing against most of the "maker" goals. Being familiar with "how stuff works" and "how to do things" used to be, well, common knowledge. Reviving these skills and encouraging inventiveness and creativity with physical objects is in general a very good thing.
(4) That said, because of my experiences with the pretentious idiots above, I would never want anyone to refer to me as a "maker," despite the fact that I value many of the same skills and have for decades. I also don't consider that most of my skills qualify me for any special title -- they're just general purpose things that any person should be familiar with, like basic woodworking, mechanical know-how, electronics, etc. Just because I've built some of my own things out of wood and tend to take apart an electric device to try to fix it (rather than throwing it out right away and buying a new one) doesn't grant me any special status -- it's just living life and being a well-rounded person with some practical skills.
What I find particularly unattractive about the "maker" designation is how they've tried to co-opt every person who does just about anything and try to act like they are part of this "movement." Recently, when I told someone that I bake bread rather than buy it from the store, ferment stuff, experiment with making soft cheeses, occasionally can things, and do a few other things in the kitchen, they asked whether I was a "maker."
What the heck? No -- I'm doing exactly what my grandmother did. It's practical, useful skills in my kitchen that save me money and frankly produce food that tastes better than anything I can buy in grocery store.
Have you ever sewn something? Have you ever made your own soap? Do you compost in your backyard? Apparently, you too can be a maker.
For some people, it's gotten to the point that having any basic practical skill which most people send out to a 3rd party turns you into a "maker."
And most of the time, the emphasis that I've heard from the self-identified "makers" I know is on simplicity and deliberate avoidance of advanced skills. The typical "maker" isn't striving to create a beautiful ornate cabinet with inlaid wood of four different colors -- no... the "maker" wants to be able have a "recipe" that chops up a pre-fabricated door into seven parts and reassembles it as an ugly, but functional cabinet in an afterno