In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which set up a £20,000 prize to the person who could come up with a way to accurately determine longitude (where you are East-to-West) for a ship at sea. This was a major business problem for shipping between Europe and the New World that needed to be solved. The prize was equivalent to over $4.5 million in today’s cash – an 18th century prototype for the X PRIZE.
The mathematics of the problem were simple. The real issue was that the math required an accurate measure of the time of day. The only clocks at the time accurate enough to solve the problem were pendulum clocks, which are utterly useless on a rocking sailing ship. So, the race to solve the longitude problem was really a race to engineer a clock that would work on a boat.
An English clockmaker named John Harrison worked for almost thirty years to solve the problem. His first attempts were based on the idea that a clock’s pendulum could be replaced by springs and balances. These would not only keep time, but subtract out the motion of the ship. Harrison spent over twenty years refining this idea. The only problem was it didn’t really work.
Harrison had been trying to build a kind of pendulum that could work on a moving boat. However, after designing a precision pocket watch to help him with observation and measurements, Harrison realized he had been looking at the problem the wrong way all along. Pocket watches at the time were far too inaccurate and unreliable to solve the longitude problem. However, despite this major weakness, pocket watches performed reasonably well, and more importantly did so while moving around in a person’s pocket.
Harrison realized his very difficult motion problem had already been solved. He didn’t need a pendulum clock that worked on a boat, he needed a pocket watch that was very accurate. It only took him six years to solve this simpler problem. The result – the H4 marine chronometer, which won the Longitude Prize and changed maritime transportation forever.
What inspires me about Harrison’s story is not just his dogged perseverance in working the problem for thirty years. I am awed by the selflessness and courage it took Harrison to reframe his problem, abandon over twenty years of work and move in a new direction. Sometimes the answer is not a tweak of the obvious solution, but rather a refinement of something that on the surface seems completely inadequate to the task.
How often do we get stuck doing what we do because it’s what we’re comfortable with, or it’s our biggest selling product or service, or we’re out to prove something to the world? When we can let go of all that, we can finally begin to define our work not by the things we do, but by the problems that we solve.
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To read more about John Harrison, check out the excellent book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
Image by lucunus
