John Harrison
(1693 – 1776)
Master clockmaker and winner of the world’s first great crowdsourced competition
On 22 October 1707, a fleet of the Royal Navy, under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, encountered severe weather near the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of England. Four ships ran aground and were wrecked, with the loss of 1,400 sailors, including Shovell himself. The main cause of the disaster was the inability of the seamen to calculate their positions accurately. In those days, navigators had great difficulty in ascertaining their longitude – how far east or west they were.
The Scilly naval disaster was one of the worst catastrophes at sea and caused much consternation in Britain. So much so, that, in 1714, the ...
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