Nevertheless the desirability of producing a portable time-keeper of great accuracy was obvious, and the efforts of a large number of experimenters were directed towards this end in the course of the eighteenth century. These efforts were stimulated by the hope of earning a prize of twenty thousand pounds offered by the British Government for a watch sufficiently accurate to determine the location of a ship with maximum error of half a degree, or thirty nautical miles, corresponding to two minutes of time, in the course of a transatlantic voyage. It affords a striking illustration of the relative backwardness of nautical science, and of the difficulties to be overcome, to reflect that no means then available enabled the navigator at the termination of a transatlantic voyage to be sure of his location within the distance of thirty nautical miles by any means of astronomical or other observation known to the science of the time.
The problem was finally solved by an ingenious British carpenter named John Harrison, who devoted his life to the undertaking, and who came finally to be the most successful of watchmakers. Harrison first achieved distinction by inventing the compensating pendulum--a pendulum made of two metals having a different rate of expansion under the influence of heat, so adjusted that change in one was compensated by a different rate of change in the other. Up to the time of this discovery, even the best of pendulum clocks had failed of an ideal degree of accuracy owing to the liability to change of length of the pendulum--and so, of course, to corresponding change in the rate of its oscillation--with every alteration of temperature. Another means of effecting the desired compensation was subsequently devised by Mr. Graham, through the use of a well of mercury in connection with the pendulum, so arranged that the expansion of the mercury upward in its tube would compensate the lengthening of the pendulum itself under effect of heat, and vice versa; but the Harrison pendulum, variously modified in design, remains in use as a highly satisfactory solution of the problem.
Harrison early conceived the idea that it might be possible to apply the same principle to the balance-wheel of the watch. This problem presented very great practical difficulties, but by persistent effort these were finally overcome, and a balance-wheel produced, which, owing to the unequal expansion and contraction of its two component metals under changing temperature, altered its shape and so maintained its rate of oscillation almost--though never quite--regardless of changing conditions of temperature.