
Clockmaker John Harrison vindicated 250 years after ‘absurd’ claims - mnem
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-john-harrison-vindicated-250-years-absurd-claims
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digikata
Incidentally, the book "Longitude", by Dava Sobel is a fun read about John
Harrison and how timekeeping was critical for navigation of long distances at
sea at the time.

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x1798DE
This seems like a lot of spin, honestly. I don't have the background here, but
Harrison evidently _didn 't_ build a clock with the claimed accuracy. Some
people with access to advanced material and fabrication technology (whether
they availed themselves of it is not mentioned) built it over 200 years later.
It seems entirely possible that their skepticism was based on the fact that
actually building such a thing was infeasible at the time.

Additionally, I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to pretend like people
thought he was a crank. He was well-regarded as a brilliant clock-designer and
builder.

I mean, I think it's totally plausible that he could have built such a thing -
I live in a world where 1 second in 100 days doesn't seem like a terribly
accurate clock, so I'm not particularly blown away by the claim. I just think
it's worth pointing out that probably a lot of these highly adversarial
stories that make for a neat little story are probably not an accurate picture
of reality.

