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posted by CoolHand on Monday April 20 2015, @04:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the maintaining-the-perfect-4:20-for-our-stoners-today dept.

The Guardian has an article on the verification of a 250-year-old claim by clock maker John Harrison over the accuracy of his designs:

After a 100-day trial, the timepiece known as Clock B – which had been sealed in a clear plastic box to prevent tampering – was officially declared, by Guinness, to be the world's "most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air".

It was an intriguing enough award. But what is really astonishing is that the clock was designed more than 250 years ago by a man who was derided at the time for "an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity", and whose plans for the clock lay ignored for two centuries.

[...] At a conference, Harrison Decoded: Towards a Perfect Pendulum Clock, held at Greenwich yesterday, observatory scientists revealed that a clock that had been built to the clockmaker's exact specifications had run for 100 days during official tests and had lost only five-eighths of a second in that period.

The same story is also covered at The Telegraph and The Independent.

Wikipedia has more background on John Harrison. NOVA's Lost At Sea: The Search For Longitude (transcript) may also be of interest.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:29AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:29AM (#173447) Homepage

    If that was true his clock would make hours seem like days.

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