06-22-2017, 09:40 PM | #31 |
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Certainly those surveyors owe a debt to Harrison and his clocks. The sextant could tell you where you were in terms of N/S of the equator (Latitude) but it was Harrison's time piece that opened things up for greater precision in fixing your longitude (E/W of your home port) and therefore allowed the continents to be pictured fairly accurately on maps for the first time.
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06-23-2017, 03:26 PM | #32 | |
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Quote:
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06-29-2017, 01:44 AM | #33 |
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Longitude was just too lightweight. It felt like it was written for grade school kids.
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06-29-2017, 01:57 AM | #34 |
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06-29-2017, 06:39 PM | #35 |
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I imagine a lot of the 'lightweight' feeling comes from the fact that we have so little documentation about the life of John Harrison. Shakespeare is the same way. We know little about his actual day to day life in comparison to his plays. Probably in both cases it's a matter of people not thinking in the long term. It likely never occurred to them that someone should really document Harrison's life for the future any more than it probably occurred to friends of Shakespeare to do so in any great detail when they collected the First Folio for publication.
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