Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
And was so simple you could explain it to someone/anyone in a few moments. Not something you could do with Maskalyne's tables I'm thinking.
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No, not even once the heavy lifting of Lunars had been done by tables, they were still far more complex. And remember that those tables weren't published until well
after Harrison's clocks had amply demonstrated to an unbiased mind (if one could have been found) that they could and did solve the problem simply and quite elegantly.
The one real caveat of the Harrison clocks, and their immediate successors, was the cost and time to create. It was quite a while before the price came down to something that could reasonably be afforded by a seagoing captain. And even when the price got down to somewhere below £100, it was still more expensive than a Rolex of today.