Time - Last Friday with Harrison
Last Friday, I gave a speech on the subject of ‘Time’. The event was a fundraiser to restore the turret clock in Old Heathfield church, East Sussex, and typically, I was late. Late, because I have been agonising about writing a speech. A speech with dates, names, and places. Then with half an hour left at my desk, I decided nobody wants facts at a ‘cheese & wine’. It's Friday, we've had a whole week of facts, let's loose the notes and endeavour to entertain.
I started with, ‘I've just got to start my timer,’ and paused. It's amazing how silence draws people in, but a pause can't be squandered. It may be used at either the beginning or the end of the speech. I continued, “I once had to give a eulogy for a young man. In preparation, the vicar said keep it to 8 minutes, less is too little and beyond 8 is too much.”
I continued, “We have all been invited under false pretences, as I walked towards the church in the dark I saw the clock was illuminated and read the time as 6.40. I looked at my wristwatch, it showed 6.40, I read the turret clock’s face again, 6.40, it's working! But I’m told, we need the final sum of money to complete the striking mechanism. Lucky neighbours. There is nothing like listening to the hours and quarters at 3am in the morning!
‘Time’ and John Harrison will always be linked. Why so, because of the Longitude Act passed by parliment 8th July 1714 during the reign of Queen Anne. Sorry about the date, I know it's just a cheese and wine. The Act offered a prize £20,000 to the person who could accurately calculate longitude to 1/2 degree. Why the big prize? There had been too many losses of ships to rocks and crew to scurvy. Highlighted by the embarrassing tragedy in 1707 of Admiral Cloudsley Shovel, who lost 4 homebound warships on the Scilly Isles with a loss of 2,000 men! The trigonometry of the planets gave us the parallels, ie latitude. I spoke of my belt around my waist as the equator, my thinning hair is the north pole and my tired feet as the south pole. But what we couldn't find, only reckon, was where we were east to west. Harrison and his contempories knew the world was round and revolved every 24 hours, so 360° divided by 24, equals 15° per hour. A navigator could tell what time it was by the position of the sun during daytime, and by planets at night. So if he knew what time it was at his port of departure, say Portsmouth, and subtracted or added the difference in time, you would be able to plot your position on your nautical chart. Even, when I write this, I still struggle to understand how a position was plotted. Given; the weather, ship’s speed and human error, but with the triangulation of Greenwich meantime, current time and a nautical chart, you could arrive at a point of longitude.
It took John Harrison, the Yorkshireman 40 years to make an accurate timekeeper. An instrument, we now know today as, a marine chronometer.
Too much detail, I was losing my audience. I retrieve them with all great stories have heroes and villains. The hero is the clockmaker John Harrison and the villain was Nevill Masklynn, Astronomer Royal. Masklynn, wanted the prize to go to a scientist and not a ‘mechanic’. Through, old fashioned, snobbery and his position as chairman longitude board, Masklynn managed to delay Harrisons recognition as the keeper of accurate time. Accurate to 1/2 second per month!
I have been speaking for 11 minutes. Wrap it up. I resist comparing Harrison to the genius of Michelangelo or Mozart, but I did say Harrison gave Britain an instrument to dominate the seas. Which turned our world atlas’s ‘pink.’
