John Harrison
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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John Harrison (24 March 1693 – 24 March 1776) was an English clockmaker who revolutionised and extended the possibility of safe long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail by inventing a long-sought and critically-needed key piece in the problem of accurately establishing the East-West position, or longitude, of a ship at sea, a problem considered so intractable that the British Parliament offered what was at the time a huge fortune for a solution (£20,000, roughly £6 million in 2007 terms.
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