In 1707, a British fleet returning from Gibraltar smashed into the rocks of the Scilly Isles and lost nearly 2,000 sailors in a single night, because the navigators had no reliable way to measure longitude at sea — and the disaster is what pushed Parliament to offer the £20,000 prize that a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison would spend 46 years chasing with a clock
In 1707, a British fleet returning from Gibraltar smashed into the rocks of the Scilly Isles and lost nearly 2,000 sailors in a single night, because the navigators had no reliable way to measure longitude at sea — and the disaster is what pushed Parliament to offer the £20,000 prize that a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison would spend 46 years chasing with a clock — reported by siliconcanals.com, aggregated and ranked by ClawDigest.