The problem was really one for the watchmaker, since a clock is made for keeping time while standing in one position and a watch for keeping time while being moved about. John Harrison, the inventor of the famous gridiron pendulum, finally won the munificent prize. In 1762, after several trials and failures, he succeeded in producing a timepiece which varied, under test, only a minute and four seconds during a voyage of some five months. This was excellent timekeeping—far within half a second a day; it made it possible for a captain at sea to determine his position within eighteen miles. Harrison's mechanism was too complicated for description in these pages. Indeed, it was so difficult of comprehension that, before paying him his reward, the English government asked Harrison to write a book of explanation in order that his inventions might be copied by other makers. He did so and finally received the money. Harrison's ideas have now been greatly simplified, but, in general, his plan is used in the making of marine chronometers to this day; thus, in a sense, it is due to Harrison's brain that our great ships are able to cross the ocean on almost schedule time.
Both the first success of the chronometer and the later efforts toward improving it had a great influence upon the next few generations of watchmakers; the final improvements were made in the days of the American Revolution. It was at this latter period that a man named Thomas Mudge worked out the kind of escapement that is still used in our watches. A little later, the Swiss-Parisian, Abraham Louis Breguét, improved the hair-spring by bending its outer coil across the others to their center and fastening it at that point in order that the spiral of the spring should expand equally in all directions from the center.
The last development of importance consisted in doing away with the fusee. The faults of this device had been the need of a thick watch to give it room, and the danger that a broken mainspring might destroy other parts of the movement in its recoil. French and Swiss watchmakers reduced the friction until it needed very little power to run the mechanism, and then were able to employ a mainspring which was not stiff enough to require a fusee. American makers adopted this idea, but the British clung to the fusee and the stiff spring; it has cost them much of their prestige as watchmakers and much of their trade.
Thus, the mechanism of both clocks and watches was practically in its present state by the year 1800. The "grandfather's clock" of that date may look old-fashioned, but it tells time a modern way, and the mechanical ideas in George Washington's watch were not so very different from those which we find in our own. There have been many small improvements since, but the great inventions had all been made.
It is interesting to remember that most of these inventions are due to the English artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although in delicate workmanship and beautiful decoration, they were equaled and perhaps excelled by the Swiss and by the French. The work of producing a satisfactory timekeeping machine, begun by priests and by astronomers, and carried forward by the demands of the navigator and the patient labor of the craftsman, had ended after thousands of years, in triumph. The ticking contrivance of wheels, levers, and springs was no longer a mechanical toy; it was a marvelous instrument which was made by man with his head and hands and yet was almost as accurate in its action as the sun and stars themselves.
Here ends the first great division of our story. The scientific problem had been solved; what remained was to democratize the keeping of time; to place mechanism equal to the best of those days within the reach and within the means of every man. In this later development the work was to pass out of the hands of artists and inventors into those of manufacturers. Its history from this point on is no longer a record of science but a romance of industry.
CHAPTER TEN
The "Worshipful Company" and English Watchmaking
From the beginning, there are two sides to the history of timekeeping. The first is the story of discovery and invention—how men labored for thousands of years to produce a contrivance that would really tell the time. But if only a few such machines existed in the world, it would be of very little use to humanity in general, however perfect each might be. Accordingly history must now recount how clocks and watches came to be made in sufficiently large numbers and at sufficiently low cost to be within the reach of all who needed them.