Roman Mars

One knot equals one nautical mile per hour.

If you remember nothing else, remember that.

For centuries, everyone from seamen to astronomers struggled to figure out what became known as the problem of longitude.

And so much time passed without a solution that people put longitude in the same bucket as finding the philosopher's stone or turning lead into gold.

Basically, you'd go mad before you'd ever figure it out.

Still, that didn't stop the big colonial powers of Europe from trying for longitude.

There was just too much riding on a solution.

In other words, it was just a lot safer to know where you were going.

Global powers of the time knew that there was an ill-gotten fortune to be made if your kingdom's ships were the fastest, most efficient, and safest ones on the ocean.

The Longitude Act of 1714 dangled a massive prize in front of anyone who could come up with a workable solution.

Parliament was trying to motivate the great scientific minds of the time, for the love of God, to finally figure out where the f*** they were.

If you pulled into harbor with the greatest level of accuracy, just 30 nautical miles or half a degree of longitude, you'd get the highest prize.

With the modern equivalent of around 3 million bucks on the line, all sorts of people came out of the woodwork with wacky solutions involving, among other things, cannons, dogs, and magic powder.

In the world of navigation, astronomy reigned supreme.

Astronomers were men of science, and over the many, many years, they had been inching closer to a solution.

But for all their high towers and stargazing, no one had managed to bring the issue of longitude within reach.

Historical records of his early life are scarce, but we know that he was born in 1693 and generally described as a sort of single-minded, eccentric guy who was a genius when it came to clocks.

Harrison's timekeepers were some of the best, most accurate clocks in the world, which made him particularly well-suited to finally solving the longitude problem.

The whole scientific community had known for a long time that it was hypothetically possible to calculate longitude using time differences.

You just needed to know your own local time and the time back at your home port.