Chronometer maker Harrison vindicated

Brilliant clockmaker and inventor of the navigational chronometer John Harrison must be laughing in his grave after a 100-day trial of his ‘clock B’ was officially declared by Guinness World Records, to be the world’s ‘most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air’.

Remarkably, Harrison designed the clock more than 250 years ago – after developing the chronometer, he claimed that he could make a pendulum timepiece that would be accurate to within a second over a 100-day period.

The challenge would be impossible, his enemies insisted but the Guinness trial shows that Harrison: scientists at the Greenwich observatory this week revealed that the clock built to the Harrison’s clockmaker’s design and owned by artist and clockmaker Martin Burgess had successfully run for a period of 100 days during official tests, during which it had had lost only five-eighths of a second.

For more information see The Guardian, and the British Horological Society press release.

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