Invisible Stars - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 70

as one akin to fraud or con artistry, the charge brought against Harrison was
undoubtedly a tactic aimed at forcing him to divulge his secret design to the
Board of Longitude. 3
Despite the repeal of witchcraft laws, widespread ignorance, misunderstand-
ing, and superstitions about science and technology persisted into the nine-
teenth century (some may argue that they extend to the present). In a magazine
article first published in Charles Dickens's Household Words and reprinted in
the inaugural 1850 edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine , Frederick Knight
Hunt noted “a superstition not wholly extinct” that the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich was the “abode of sorcerers and astrologers.” 4 In addition to tele-
scopes the observatory featured a room full of chronometers being monitored
while alternately subjected to extreme heat and cold—a test laboratory for the
Board of Admiralty. Hunt suggested that the tendency to conflate astronomy
with astrology was understandable, given that uneducated people might see
little difference between predicting the future through horoscopes and pro-
ducing almanacs foretelling “to a second when and where each planet may be
seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years.” 5
Capt. James Cook (1728-79) was not only a pathbreaking explorer, remem-
bered for leading three famous expeditions around the world and visiting places
no European had gone before. He was also an innovative seaman who intro-
duced sauerkraut as a shipboard staple to prevent scurvy and experimented
with distillation equipment to provide fresh water. Cook also was an expert
navigator, surveyor, and mapmaker, having spent years mastering the tech-
nique of calculating positions using celestial observations and astronomical
almanacs. Today we would call him an “early adopter” of new technologies.
On his second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, he embraced a new technology that
later came to be called the marine chronometer. Cook called it a watch, or
watch machine. The timepiece carried aboard Cook's ship, the Resolution , was
a replica of John Harrison's masterpiece, h4, the product of years spent design-
ing a clock that would remain accurate at sea despite tossing waves and fluc-
tuating temperatures and humidity. Clockmaker Larcum Kendall built the
watch, so it acquired the nickname k1. A companion ship, the Adventure , car-
ried three timepieces of a different design built by John Arnold.
The English Board of Longitude commissioned William Wales to join Cook's
expedition as official minder of the Kendall watch, and Captain Cook's journals
contain numerous references to Wales's observations comparing longitudinal
positions predicted by the watch to celestial sightings and to established longi-