The Clockmaker Who Retuned the Universe

By 1775, John Harrison was eighty-two, had built five sea clocks, and had solved the longitude problem so thoroughly that on its 1761 Jamaica trial H4 lost five seconds in eighty-one days. Newton had said the thing could not be done. A Lincolnshire choirmaster, never apprenticed to a watchmaker, had done it.

So he sat down and wrote a book.

The title ran to forty-odd words and promised three subjects: a true mensuration of time, an account of the longitude by the moon, and the discovery of the scale of musick. The clockmaking section claimed a pendulum could be made to keep time to within a second over a hundred days. Reviewers called this outlandish. He pressed on, into the music. Existing harmonic theory, he announced, was inconsistent nonsense, resting on a nonsensical Comma of 81 to 80, and he proposed instead a system of tuning derived from pi. What musicians made of this is not recorded.

He died the following March, on his eighty-third birthday.

In 2015, at the National Maritime Museum, a pendulum clock built to his despised 1775 specifications was sealed under glass and observed for a hundred days.

It lost five-eighths of a second.