Continuing the discussion of Dava Sobel's Longitude.
It’s one thing to marvel at the dedication and discipline of one man who without formal training, working nearly alone and nearly without pay, invents not one but five sea-going chronometers capable of facilitating sailors in their calculation of longitude, thereby allowing them to accurately fix their position on the open sea. It’s another when we consider what was arrayed against John Harrison as he undertook this accomplishment.
First, there was the prevailing theory of lunar distance calculation championed by a historical and present population of powerful astronomers from Galileo, whose lunar distance tables were used to determine longitude on land, to the powerful conclave of such men represented in the Royal Observatory during Harrison’s lifetime. In addition, there existed institutionalized reluctance to acknowledge Harrison’s chronometer embodied in the Board of Longitude. Beyond a rival legitimate methodology and intellectual resistance for calculating longitude using a chronometer, competition for the prize included the plethora of featherbrained methods. Consider also the daunting inadequacy of existing technology – most clocks were of the pendulum variety which was useless aboard a swaying and plunging ship; the disadvantages in a class-oriented society of having no powerful connections, no recognized qualifications, and no punched ticket in any profession. Lastly, there was the most formidable obstacle: a man, a personal rival, a conspirator against Harrison, even a saboteur. It is with Harrison’s nemesis that this post concerns itself.
Harrison persisted against the limitations of technology with stunning success as we learned in last week’s post. But the second story in John Harrison’s long tale in his fight to create a machine is his battle with one man – the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal, remembered in history as “the seaman’s astronomer” and by readers of this book as the Arch Villain (although it would be fairer to characterize him as the anti-hero). Nevertheless, “John Harrison hated him with a passion, and with good reason.” Maskelyne had help in frustrating Harrison from the then current Astronomer Royal, Dr. Bradley who held up the test voyage of H-3 to Jamaica in order to gain time for Maskelyne to provide proof supporting his lunar distance method, the one favored by astronomers and "men of science." Dr. Bradley also had interest in the longitude prize and what he hoped would be his share of £10,000. Conflict of interest one might say.
That Maskelyne was hardheaded, conceited, and anal retentive is supported by evidence. He wrote his autobiography in the third person, not just referring to himself as “he” but also as “Our Astronomer.” Even his biographer described him as “rather a swot” and “a bit of a prig.” Within his family, where everyone had a nickname, Nevil was just known as Nevil. And as a professional, he devoted himself to the minutiae of oft repeated observations of the relative positions of heavenly bodies necessary to create lunar distance tables.
You get the picture. Back to our plot and the plotters. John Harrison has a sea-going clock ready to meet the Board of Longitude trial for the £20,000 prize, his astounding chronometer.
During Dr. Bradley’s strategic delay on behalf of Maskelyne, Harrison withdrew H-3 from contention, banking everything on that miracle of devising known as H-4, or, simply, the Watch, which performed beautifully when its first trial was finally performed, sailing into home port with an adjusted error of just under two minutes over the thousands of miles traveled.
But triumph turned to frustration when the Board of Longitude met to evaluate the Watch. “Having stipulated the four keys [to lock the Watch in its case and prevent tampering] and the two astronomers, the board now called for three mathematicians to check and recheck the data on the time determinations at Portsmouth and Jamaica, as both of these suddenly seemed insufficient and inaccurate.” They added some quibbling complaint about establishing longitude by the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons not having been done.
When all the palaver and objections faded, the board’s final report in August 1762 concluded, “the Experiments already made of the Watch have not been sufficient to determine the Longitude at Sea.” H-4 needed to be tested again, under stricter rules. Instead of the £20,000 prize, Harrison was bestowed with £1,500 in recognition of his watch being “wanting,” but still “an invention of considerable utility to the Public.”
Harrison stood by frustrated as events beyond his control unfolded. Maskelyne immediately published The British Mariner’s Guide based on his months of astronomical observations. His ally, Dr. Bradley, died, having acquired not a penny of longitude prize money, despite his efforts. The next Astronomer Royal was Nathaniel Bliss, who was also all for lunars.
It wasn’t until March 1764 that H-4, accompanied by Harrison’s son, William, set out for its second trial voyage to the West Indies where, on the island of Barbados, awaited none other than the hand-picked judge of the Watch’s performance, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne.
After the second trial, the board allowed months to pass in total silence, waiting for their mathematicians to compare the Watch’s performance against Maskelyne’s observations. Finally, the verdict: “The Watch proved to tell the longitude within ten miles – three time more accurately than the terms of the Longitude Act demanded.” Wasn’t it time Harrison received his reward?
But the Board was not done with its demands. It only handed over half the money, insisting that Harrison cede all his chronometers to them and provide a full disclosure of the clockwork within H-4. If Harrison wanted to collect the entire prize, he’d also have to supervise the production of two copies of H-4 as proof its design and performance could be duplicated.
On top of the foot-dragging and new conditions by the board, Bliss died. His successor was none other than Maskelyne who quickly set about entrenching his book of tables and the lunar distance methodology as the standard method for British sailors to calculate longitude. And with his seat on the board that went with his position, he rightly felt like the catbird.
Under his nemesis’ very eye, Harrison was forced to dismantle H-4 over a period of six days, reassemble it, and surrender it to the Board of Longitude. With all Harrison’s chronometers “out of circulation” and in his possession, Maskelyne proceeded to institutionalize the constant updating of his data, publishing succeeding updates that were issued in two volumes under the titles of the Almanac and Tables Requisite, which continued to appear even after his death and continuously until 1907.
In 1766, the (let's be blunt) fickle board decided that H-4 had to undergo yet another trial at the Royal Observatory for a period of 10 months, to be performed by none other than the Astronomer Royal. Further, it announced all Harrison’s chronometers were now public property. What followed is a prolonged period of Maskelyne devising diabolic tests – leaving one chronometer exposed to full sunlight (after it had been dropped to the floor during transport), bolted to a window seat in the Observatory; conducting mock “sea voyages,” and establishing that the watch strangely failed to perform on one out of 6 such fake voyages, within the old test guidelines. His folderol completed, Maskelyne rather prissily concluded that “Mr. Harrison’s watch cannot be depended upon to keep the Longitude within a degree in a West India voyage of six weeks.” It was, he said, unreliable, could not be trusted, and was less constant than the stars.
It was only in 1772, after having written a letter of appeal to the king and securing an interview, Harrison’s son, William heard the king proclaim that his father was deemed to have been cruelly treated. King George III ordered his own set of new trials to be performed by his personal tutor, the astronomer, Dr. Demainbray. The tests were performed on Harrison’s copy of H-4, known as H-5, which had taken him three years to build and two years to adjust. After 10 weeks of daily observations, H-5 proved accurate within one-third of one second per day. Harrison was now 79 years old.
Once again the board met on April 24, 1773, but only due to the government’s badgering and in front of two witnesses from Parliament. Within a few weeks after that meeting concluded, Parliament awarded Harrison £8,750, the remainder of the longitude prize due to him – awarded in spite of the Board of Longitude and the Royal Astronomer, not because of them. The following year Parliament debated the issue again, overturned the previous Act and drew up new terms for the longitude prize with trial conditions so stringent (much to Maskelyne’s delight) that the prize was never claimed.
History, however, conspired to affirm Harrison's remarkable device as everything Maskelyne claimed it was not. In July 1775, Captain Cook returned from his second circumnavigation voyage “with bouquets of praise for the method of finding longitude by means of a timekeeper.” It had “exceeded the expectations of its most zealous advocate and by being now and then corrected by lunar observations has been our faithful guide through all vicissitudes and climates.” K-1, the first copy of H-4, accompanied Cook on his third fatal voyage and reportedly stopped ticking almost at the instant when the captain died.
John Harrison died on March 24, 1776, 83 years to the day after his birth, a martyr among clockmakers. Others of the guild continued to make timepieces, the Astronomer Royal continued to sabotage them, making one, manufactured by a Mr. Mudge, stop running by his mishandling and a month later, breaking the device’s mainspring. Within three years of Harrison’s death the Watch and the hundreds like it then in existence were designated as “The machine[s] used for measuring time at sea [are] here named chronometer. . .so valuable a machine deserves to be known by a name instead of a definition.”
Over the years, Maskelyne “tried” various watchmakers until he finally found one he liked enough to confer a shared prize upon. By 1815, 5,000 chronometers were being used to determine longitude. In 1860, when the Royal Navy had fewer than 200 ships sailing all the seas, it alone owned close to 800 chronometers. Notwithstanding his personality and questionable intellectual honesty, Maskelyne’s Almanac established Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian. To this day, Day begins there. The big sea-going clocks bestowed to Maskelyne’s “care” were never wound nor tended by him, but were consigned to a damp storage area where they were forgotten until 25 years after his death. Today, all are in working order, ticking away in their dry and well-maintained home at the Maritime Museum not far from where Harrison lies buried, some miles from Greenwich.
Sobel’s Longitude has all the elements of a great novel. A staunch hero, a worthy villainous foe, plot twists, quirky background characters, intellectual problems to be overcome, setbacks and complications to be surmounted, treachery, adventure, and eventual triumph for the hero on every level. The greatest themes are all present: Man vs. Nature, vs. Man, vs. Machine, and Good vs. Evil. The characters are fully realized. We have a flawed hero who suffered from personal shortcomings; a villain who wasn’t entirely bad, faithful servants who were pivotal in the eventual triumph (what aravir would call “second bananas”), dashing historical figures to lend romance, and the presence of a king to add pomp. Longitude is not only fascinating historically and scientifically, it’s also a ripping good yarn. I hope everyone who read it with the Club enjoyed it as much as I did.
For the e-Readers and Book Lovers Club next read, please check the comments.