I'm looking at photos in The Illustrated Longitude (Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrewes) of beautiful chronometers designed and assembled in the 1700s and 1800s. A number of people were competing for some very large prize money offered by the British Parliament to the person who could come up with a way to figure out longitude precisely when at sea. There were two main schools of thought. One was that the best readings would be generated through astronomical data and observations. The other school of thought was that using an accurate timepiece to coordinate time with star positions would be the best way to figure precise location.

This competition was fascinating on many levels - the efforts and consuming passion of the scientists and engineers, the politics behind the preferences shown by the Parliament committee known as the Board of Longitude, the reasons achieving this goal was considered so important, and what happened to the various shining timepieces, each of which took years to complete.

A number of questions have been percolating. The book makes me want to understand better how the timepieces worked, and, since the new timepieces were being compared with official time generated by a clock in Greenwich as a measure of accuracy, how did the Greenwich timepiece work?

How important is timekeeping to us humans, and shared agreement about labeling what time it is?

Finally, having written about the Antikythera mechanism earlier in the week, and having finished reading the book Longitude, the question comes to mind whether the Antikythera Mechanism was not so much a calendrical gadget but more of a grand-scale clock?

(Below are images of a greeting card I bought a couple years ago -)