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During the 19th century, the British Empire covered about 10,000,000 square miles populated by 400 million people. The only real superpower of the Victorian era, England's reach was due to its domination of the sea. How did they do it? Through...
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During the 19th century, the British Empire covered about 10,000,000 square miles populated by 400 million people. The only real superpower of the Victorian era, England's reach was due to its domination of the sea. How did they do it? Through innovations in timekeeping. In the late 15th century, when Christopher Columbus was exploring the globe, primitive sand or sandglass clocks were used to mark time in half-hour increments. Since the watches lasted four hours, the helmsman would mark the end of the first half-hour with one bell, the end of the second with two bells, etc., until he hit eight bells at the end of his watch. Time would be tracked as such: One bell for 4:30, 8:30, and 12:30; two bells for 5:00, 9:00, 1:00; three bells for 5:30, 9:30, 1:30; four bells for 6:00, 10:00, and 2:00; five bells for 6:30, 10:30, and 2:30; six bells for 7:00, 11:00, and 3:00; seven bells for 7:30, 11:30, and 3:30; and eight bells for 8:00, 12:00, and 4:00. Despite this clever manual timekeeping method, before the mid-1750s, one of the most difficult problems seafarers faced was how to calculate their ship’s position on the globe when there was no land in sight. Using “celestial navigation,” one could figure out latitude measuring the sun’s angle at its highest point in the sky at noon. But to measure longitude accurately based on the sun’s position, you needed to know exactly what time it was at a fixed location, usually the Greenwich Meridian. Then, the longitudinal distance could be calculated comparing the time with that of the fixed location. At the time, the most accurate, reliable timekeepers were regulator or pendulum clocks, but these proved useless at sea because they got thrown off-balance by the rolling waves and the 0.2 percent variation in gravity around the globe. In 1675, the inventor of the pendulum clock, Christiaan Huygens, came up with a portable clock that used a balance wheel and a spring for regulation, but it was still not accurate enough...
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