"Longitude"

Our hero is John Harrison.

• John Harrison... invented a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world.'
• The clock never needs lubrication, because the parts that would normally call for it were carved out of lignum vitae, a tropical hardwood that exudes its own grease.
• H-1: It is a model ship, escaped from its bottle, afloat on the sea of time.
• ...it still runs gamely in all its friction-free glory.. The decorated face clashes with the lskeletal works - the way a well-dressed woman might look if she stood behind an imaging screen that bared her beating heart.
• What did it matter what the Royal Society thought of H-2, it its mechanism did not pass muster with him?
• William Hogarth, well known for his obsession with time and timekeeping, who had actually started out as an engraver of watchcases, .. had portrayed a "longitude lunatic," scribbling a dim-witted solution to the longitude problem on the walls of Bedlam Asylum, in .. The Rake's Progress.
• the challenge of H-3, which contains 753 separate parts..
• The Jefferys timepiece .. lay inside a jeweler's safe in a shop that took a direct bomb hit during the Battle of Britain, then baked for then days under the building's smoldering ruins.  (It still exists.)
• Harrison loved (H-4), and said so more clearly than he ever expressed another thought: "I think I may make bold to say, that there is neither any other Mechanical or Mathematical thing in the World that is more beautiful or curious in texture than this my watch or Timekeeper for the Longitude.. and I heartily thank Almighty God that I have lived so long, as in some measure to complete it."
• These tiny jewels, exquisitely cut, take over the work that was relegated to anti-friction wheels and mechanical grasshoppers in all of Harrison's big clocks. <> How he came to master the jeweling of his Watch remains one of the most tantalizing secrets of H-4.

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