Parliament passes the Longitude Act As transoceanic travel grew in significance, so did the importance of accurate and reliable navigation at sea. While determining latitude was relatively easy, early ocean navigators had to rely on dead reckoning to estimate longitude. This was especially inaccurate on long voyages without sight of land and could sometimes lead to calamity, such as in the case of the Scilly naval disaster in 1707. This was a catastrophic wreck, in which four ships and around 2000 souls were lost. The Scilly disaster is widely regarded as one of the worst naval disasters in British naval history, and it is what finally prompted a government response to the problem: the Longitude Act. In May 1714, the petition that called for endeavours to find an adequate solution to the longitude problem was presented to Westminster Palace. Soon after this, in July 1714, Parliament passed the Longitude Act. It established the Board of Longitude and offered monetary rewards for anyone who could find a practical and simple method for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude at sea. The Act of 1714 was followed by a series of other Longitude Acts that revised or replaced the original. Solving the problem of longitude was the greatest scientific challenge of its day. Most believed that the solution to the problem would be an astronomical one rather than a horological one. For example, many thought this could be achieved by measuring the position of the navigator relative to celestial bodies, such as Jupiter’s moons, which had been discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Scientific and horological thinkers had been working on the matter for a long time and would continue to do so for the next 59 years, until the Yorkshire clockmaker John Harrison, found a definitive horological solution. In 1773, Harrison was finally awarded the Longitude Prize. In her book, Longitude, science writer Dava Sobel provides a full history of Harrison's dramatic quest to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. You can also read an account Harrison’s trials and tribulations on Clocktime. Reference Sobel, D. 2011. Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time. London: Harper Perennial. Image Credits Printed version of the Longitude Act of 1714. Object: PBE4418 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, CC BY-NC-ND, https://images.rmg.co.uk/asset/43774/ The original Longitude Act of 1714, as displayed at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. LiveRail, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Longitude_Act_1714.jpg
