This post is a transcription, plus some commentary, of the Board of Longitude's 1767 document

James Stanley - The Principles of Mr. Harrison's Time-keeper

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2024-11-10 12:30:03

This post is a transcription, plus some commentary, of the Board of Longitude's 1767 document "The Principles of Mr. Harrison's Time-keeper", from scans on the University of Cambridge Digital Library.

I was trying to learn more about the escapement in H4, and I came across a great article on "watchesbysjx": In-Depth: The Microscopic Magic of H4, Harrison's First Sea Watch, from which the scans were linked.

I have turned the English pages of the scan into a PDF for more convenient reading, you can get it here: The Principles of Mr. Harrison's Time-keeper. Sadly the first couple of pages from the Preface, and the last couple of figures, are missing from the scan and therefore from my PDF.

(Btw, if you're into this sort of stuff, I scanned in my copy of Rupert Gould's John Harrison and his Timekeepers recently - Gould rediscovered and restored Harrison's clocks in the early 20th century, and he also wrote "The Marine Chronometer: Its History and Development", which is worth a read but perhaps not at the £615 that Amazon are currently charging).

The original from 1767 is typeset in the style of the time, including use of the "long s", and "vv" instead of "w", but it is quite readable once you get used to it. In this post I have updated spelling to match modern usage, and turned Roman numerals into normal digits, but left sentence structure and capitalisation the same.