Marine Chronometer - History

History

For further details on discovering longitude, see History of longitude.

To determine a position on the Earth's surface, it is necessary and sufficient to know the latitude, longitude and altitude. Altitude considerations can, of course, be ignored for vessels operating at sea level. Until the mid-1750s, accurate navigation at sea out of sight of land was an unsolved problem due to the difficulty in calculating longitude. Navigators could determine their latitude by measuring the sun's angle at noon (i.e., when it reached its highest point in the sky, or culmination) or, in the Northern Hemisphere, to measure the angle of Polaris (the North Star) from the horizon (usually during twilight). To find their longitude, however, they needed a time standard that would work aboard a ship. Observation of regular celestial motions, such as Galileo's method based on observing Jupiter's natural satellites, was usually not possible at sea due to the ship's motion. The Lunar Distance Method, initially proposed by Johannes Werner in 1514, was developed in parallel with the marine chronometer. The Dutch scientist Gemma Frisius was the first to propose the use of a chronometer to determine longitude in 1530.

The purpose of a chronometer is to measure accurately the time of a known fixed location, for example Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This is particularly important for navigation. Knowing GMT at local noon allows a navigator to use the time difference between the ship's position and the Greenwich Meridian to determine the ship's longitude. As the Earth rotates at a regular rate, the time difference between the chronometer and the ship's local time can be used to calculate the longitude of the ship relative to the Greenwich Meridian (defined as 0°) using spherical trigonometry. In modern practice, a nautical almanac and trigonometric sight-reduction tables permit navigators to measure the Sun, Moon, visible planets, or any of 57 navigational stars at any time that the horizon is visible.

The creation of a timepiece which would work reliably at sea was difficult. Until the 20th century the best timekeepers were pendulum clocks, but both the rolling of a ship at sea and the up to 0.2% variations in the gravity of Earth made a simple gravity-based pendulum useless both in theory and in practice.