The longitude problem: history's deadliest riddle

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Written, presented and edited by

Director/DOP

[ClockworksOfGL]

Clock repairer here: It’s difficult to comprehend John Harrison’s brilliance, especially since he came from a humble family of bell hangers. He developed the caged ball bearing and the bimetallic spring, inventions we all use all day, every day. He also created the gridiron pendulum (which compensates for temperature fluctuations) and the grasshopper escapement (which requires no oil). Harrison’s “wooden” clocks used a hard, self-lubricating wood called “lingum vitae” on the bearing surfaces. The old (paraphrased) saying “Show me the perfect bearing and I’ll build you the perfect clock” was especially true in the 1700s, when oils were terrible at best. Just by doing this, he got around the problem of lubrication, at least one of his timepieces has been running without a drop of oil since it was made. I spend my days dealing with oil and consequences of bad oil. If you don’t lube your clock every few years, it will wear our. Using synthetic oil buys extra time, but it’s still a maintenance item. Most folks don’t do this, so now they’re looking at cleaning, pivot polishing and bushings and all that jazz. If Harrison’s designs really took off, I’d be out of a job, maybe I should be thankful his genius was ignored. He’s right up there with Stephenson and Brunel, maybe even Newton.

[MedlifeCrisis]

There's a wonderful TV mini series with Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon called 'Longitude'. Sadly only a low res version is available on YouTube but you can buy it for less than £20, 000+inflation. Highly recommended!

[DYWYPI]

"Died on the same day he was born" sounds a lot more poetic and noble and exciting than "died on his birthday".

[TheNathRob]

Sounds like Shovell dug his own grave...

[joshuarosen]

For anyone who is interested, £20, 000 in 1714 is almost exactly £4m today. Also, Longitude is a very interesting book.

[PopeLando]

Although John Harrison died on the same calendar date that he was born, he was born under the Julian calendar and died under the Gregorian, so technically 11 days short of 83 years old when he died.

[Aiterior]

I hope that one day you open by saying “we’re the map and here’s the men”

[aidanfarmer]

That Tiktok joke was utterly rancid and I love it

[sophia-helenemeesdetricht]

Navy sailor here: On the plus side, with digital engine readouts for speed and digital (read: inertial) compasses, dead reckoning is WAY more accurate than when this was done with a knotted rope and a shoddy magnetic compass. Navigating on an ever shifting seemingly-infinite flat-on-a-good-day featureless non-euclidean plane is always going to be a problem, complicated by drift but if GPS fails, we can still get a rough sense of where we are. This is something we had to practice, like kinda all the time. They'd make us compare our dead reckoning track on the chart with the quartermaster's astronomically-ascertained position every half hour and I could typically get us within a few miles.

[vladsnape]

In regard to the sailor that tried to warn Admiral Shovell, Wikipedia says "While it is possible that a sailor may have debated the vessel's location and feared for its fate, such debates were common upon entering the English Channel, as noted by Samuel Pepys in 1684. Naval historians have repeatedly discredited the story, noting the lack of any evidence in contemporary documents, its fanciful stock conventions and dubious origins.However, the myth was revived in 1997 when author Dava Sobel presented it as an unqualified truth in her book Longitude."

[Julio]

Now we’re expecting the intros to be weird, so you should do a perfectly classic intro next time just to mess with us

[pittofdoom]

That “moving the goalposts” joke was top-notch.

[yuvalne]

"Which in today's money is £20000 plus inflation"
That's why I love this series

[YouTube]

So many history lessons learnt through these videos, with an extra sprinkle of wit and humour 📗 😂

[colinpovey]

H1, H2, H3 and H4 are all at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, in the eastern outskirts of London. H1, H2, and H3 are all kept running, and show amazing precision. H4 does not run, as it depends upon oil for lubrication, so every tick wears it out just a little bit.

The book by Dava Sobel is beyond good, it is a superb story.

[acasualcactus]

Sir Cloudsey Shovell sounds like the name of a villain in a children’s program.

[thearth]

The problem of longitude would eventually contribute to Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, the precursor to modern computers. Longitude by lunar observation required the use of tables of logarithms, which were calculated and typeset by hand, making them prone to potentially dangerous errors. The Difference Engine (as designed) would not only calculate the tables perfectly, it also had an attached machine for turning those results directly into printing plates, eliminating all sources of human error.

[awesomefajitas]

when I was around 10 or so, I went to your “songs for rotten kids” show in edinburgh, and bought both cds and listened to them on repeat. about 3 years ago i discovered your youtube channel. I am now 17, and hearing “end of the movie” at the end of this video brought back a wave of memories. Thank you Jay Foreman

[amazing_svp_all]

“Can I have a go at your hammer”
“Bang bang bang bang bang bang”
I laughed so hard...

[realnoahsimpson]

the TikTok reference at 4:00 is 1 of the most hilarious and genius things I’ve ever seen!