File:The ships and sailors of old Salem; the record of a brilliant era of American achievement (1909) (14592638258).jpg

Identifier: cu31924028839078 (find matches)
Title: The ships and sailors of old Salem; the record of a brilliant era of American achievement
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Paine, Ralph Delahaye, 1871-1925
Subjects: Shipping
Publisher: New York : Outing Pub. Co.
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Commission sent the chronometer out in a ship bound to Jamaica in order that its mechanism might be tested by extremes of climate and temperature. On arriving at Jamaica the chronometer had varied but four seconds from Greenwich time. When the ship returned to England after an absence of 147 days, the total variation was found to be less than two minutes, or eighteen miles of longitude. The Commission demanded that the chronometer be given another trial, and it was sent to Barbados on a voyage five months long, at the end of which it showed a variation of only sixteen seconds from Greenwich time, which meant that John Harrisons chronometer had lost or gained an average of about two-thirds of a second aweek. The Yorkshire watchmaker, after a lifetime of service, had won a momentous victory, but more exacting tests were demanded of his masterpiece and he was threatened with death from old age before he was finally given the twenty thousand pounds. Thence forth the chronometer slowly made its way 4-00
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Nathaniel Bowditch, author of The Practical Navigator Nathaniel Bowditch and his Practical Navigator among ship owners as a necessary article of the captains equipment and the most important contribution to navigationsince the magnetic compass. Old-fashioned mariners with an eye to expense continued tofind their longitude by means of lunar observations for half acentury and more after the chronometer had been perfected,and in American merchant vessels the chronometer may be said to belong to the nineteenth century era of navigation. Dead reckoning and lunar observations were the main stays of the Salem sea captains in the days of their greatest activity over distant seas, and their fellow-townsman, Nathaniel Bowditch, author of The Practical Navigator, was a far greater man, and more useful to them, than John Harrison of Yorkshire. The log line and sandglass have been discarded on steamers of today in favor of the patent log with its automatic registering mechanism, but the old fashioned

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