Why the H4 should inspire innovation today

Today, 24 March, is both the anniversary of the birth and death of John Harrison (1693 - 1776).  If you have never heard of Harrison or the H4 read on, for his contribution to putting the Great into Britain is one we should seek to emulate today.

Harrison, a self-educated clock-maker, solved a problem that had bedeviled maritime nations up to the eighteenth century: how to calculate longitude whilst at sea.  Without a precise way of determining the east-west position of a ship it was impossible to navigate accurately once out of sight of land.  This meant that ships could never be entirely certain where they would make landfall, compounding the peril of shipwreck and making it difficult to establish naval supremacy.

To try to resolve this problem, Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to the first person to produce a means of accurately calculating longitude at sea. Many tried, and Harrison himself submitted three timepieces before the fourth, now known as H4, finally prevailed. Scandalously, Parliament and the Board of Longitude were very slow to acknowledge his win, despite successful sea trials, and only paid out the prize to Harrison on the intervention of George III.  British Naval supremacy over the following century and the benefits this brought through trade and empire building may be attributed in large part to this one invention.

What then are the lessons we might draw from this today?  I believe there are two: first, that the value of innovation can never be overstated, recognizing that world-beating ideas are just as likely to come from a solo entrepreneur or inventor as from a large corporation; and secondly, that if we want to extract our nation from its current economic woes, we could do worse that ask ourselves whether there is a similar problem to the longitude problem that government might offer a prize to resolve.  Our economy needs a miracle or two.  Who knows, perhaps there is a modern day John Harrison who could give us an invention that would re-place ‘Great’ for ‘Rather-Worried-About-Our-Place- in-the-World’ Britain.