A carpenter by trade, Harrison believed that the solution lied in finding a way to measure time accurately, going against many of the scientists of the day, who felt that the mystery would be solved through celestial navigation. As a result of this tragedy, in 1714, British Parliament passed the Act of Longitude to offer an enormous cash prize to the person who could solve the problem of longitude. In 1707, unable to determine their exact location through a thick fog, two thousand men of the British fleet perished by accidentally running into the rocks off of the Scilly Islands. In the eighteenth century, the problem of measuring longitude confounded scientists, sailors and politicians. This movie follows John Harrison's (Sir Michael Gambon's) quest to find the key to determining longitude. Interspersed with Harrison's story is that of Rupert Gould (Jeremy Irons), who, just after World War I, located some of Harrison's original timepieces and tried to restore them to working order. Harrison's timepieces were a marvel of the age, but it took several experiments and a great many years before his accomplishment was recognized and the cash prize awarded. The time difference could then be converted to degrees of longitude which, combined with the already existing method of calculating latitude, would give the ship's exact location. Over many years, Harrison perfected timepieces that would accurately give time at a known location, such as Greenwich, which could then be compared against local time (by measuring the position of the sun in the sky). John Harrison (Sir Michael Gambon), a carpenter by trade and amateur clockmaker, decides to try and solve the issue by building an accurate maritime clock. As a result, Parliament announced they would award a sum of twenty thousand pounds sterling to anyone who could develop an accurate method of determining longitude. The problem was an incorrect estimation of longitude, something that had yet to be perfected. In the early years of the eighteenth century, a British fleet foundered on the rocks off of the Scilly Isles due to a navigational error. Told in parallel is the twentieth century story of Rupert Gould (Jeremy Irons), for whom the restoration of Harrison's clocks to working order became first a hobby, then an obsession that threatened to wreck his life. But the Board of Longitude was biased against this approach and claiming the prize was no simple matter. He built a clock that would do the job, what we would now call a marine chronometer. This movie's main story is that of craftsman John Harrison (Sir Michael Gambon). After one too many maritime disasters due to navigational errors, the British Parliament set up a substantial prize for a way to find the longitude at sea. Observing the sun or stars would give you the latitude, but not the longitude unless done in conjunction with a clock that would keep time accurately at sea, and no such clock existed. In the eighteenth century, the only way to navigate accurately at sea was to follow a coastline all the way, which would not get you from Europe to the West Indies or the Americas.
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