A possible rare example of a supposed crackpot being vindicated, which is common in myth but rare in reality (http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/07/they-said-i-was-maaaaad.html).
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-john-harrison-vindicated-250-years-absurd-claims
Given the fact he was Britain's most celebrated clockmaker at the time, I wonder why his untested idea met with ridicule.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Harrison was a crackpot. As far as the opposition, Newton, who was on the Board of Longitude, wanted his method to win - calculating the relative lunar position against the stars, so there was at least one conflict of interest.
ReplyDeleteYou can visit his clocks at the Greenwich Observatory.
Dean Calahan Emphasis on supposed crackpot, though I know nothing about what was involved.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I get the feeling he was not a pleasant person to be around and had tendencies to rave on about things. I suspect there are folks who think I am a crackpot. For similar reasons.
ReplyDeleteA woman I loved once gave me a copy of Dava Sobel's Longitude. My idea of a romantic date: taking her to the Time Museum to see the Harrison and Thomas Tompion clocks. It used to be in Rockford Illinois USA. now all the timepieces have moved to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago IL USA.
ReplyDeleteOutside the old Time Museum in Rockford stood Martin Burgess’s Sculptural Clock with Bells.
The story of Clock B is a bit more intricate than the Guardian's (excellent) story lets on. The American Donald Saff acquired the partially-constructed Clock B. With the assistance of the noble firm of Charles Frodsham, and Martin Burgess himself, Clock B was completed.
Such efforts are often foreshortened in the telling of the tale. The building of clocks and telescopes and bridges and particle accelerators, these things may be the product of one man's vision, men such as John Harrison, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, George Ellery Hale - oh, they're important and they deserve all the recognition they'll ever get, God knoweth well. But for me, it's the people who turn these visions into reality, the dozens, hundreds, thousands of unsung heroes who construct these things - they're the heroes of these stories.
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