Our 100 day trail of 'Clock B' won @GWR for 'most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air'! pic.twitter.com/m3pnorYlOz
— Royal Mus. Greenwich (@RMGreenwich) April 18, 2015
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.