Today’s Google Doodle celebrates clockmaker John Harrison, whose efforts to calculate longitude helped people figure out their place in the world — literally.
Harrison was born 325 years ago in Yorkshire, England and grew up to become a clockmaker. Before he died in 1776, he developed a series of increasingly accurate clocks that could be used to determine a ship’s position on the globe’s east-west axis, also known as its longitude.
Seamen had long used the position of the sun or North Star in the sky to figure out latitude — that is, distance from the equator in the north-south direction, according to The Conversation. But calculating longitude was much trickier, leading to deadly navigational errors: in 1707, for example, a five-ship...
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