The longitude problem: history's deadliest riddle 

I hope that one day you open by saying “we’re the map and here’s the men”

That Tiktok joke was utterly rancid and I love it

"Died on the same day he was born" sounds a lot more poetic and noble and exciting than "died on his birthday".

Sounds like Shovell dug his own grave...

Although John Harrison died on the same calendar date that he was born, he was born under the Julian calendar and died under the Gregorian, so technically 11 days short of 83 years old when he died.

Clock repairer here: It’s difficult to comprehend John Harrison’s brilliance, especially since he came from a humble family of bell hangers. He developed the caged ball bearing and the bimetallic spring, inventions we all use all day, every day. He also created the gridiron pendulum (which compensates for temperature fluctuations) and the grasshopper escapement (which requires no oil). Harrison’s “wooden” clocks used a hard, self-lubricating wood called “lingum vitae” on the bearing surfaces. The old (paraphrased) saying “Show me the perfect bearing and I’ll build you the perfect clock” was especially true in the 1700s, when oils were terrible at best. Just by doing this, he got around the problem of lubrication, at least one of his timepieces has been running without a drop of oil since it was made. I spend my days dealing with oil and consequences of bad oil. If you don’t lube your clock every few years, it will wear our. Using synthetic oil buys extra time, but it’s still a maintenance item. Most folks don’t do this, so now they’re looking at cleaning, pivot polishing and bushings and all that jazz. If Harrison’s designs really took off, I’d be out of a job, maybe I should be thankful his genius was ignored. He’s right up there with Stephenson and Brunel, maybe even Newton.

For anyone who is interested, £20,000 in 1714 is almost exactly £4m today. Also, Longitude is a very interesting book.

In regard to the sailor that tried to warn Admiral Shovell, Wikipedia says "While it is possible that a sailor may have debated the vessel's location and feared for its fate, such debates were common upon entering the English Channel, as noted by Samuel Pepys in 1684. Naval historians have repeatedly discredited the story, noting the lack of any evidence in contemporary documents, its fanciful stock conventions and dubious origins.However, the myth was revived in 1997 when author Dava Sobel presented it as an unqualified truth in her book Longitude."

There's a wonderful TV mini series with Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon called 'Longitude'. Sadly only a low res version is available on RU-vid but you can buy it for less than £20,000+inflation. Highly recommended!

Now we’re expecting the intros to be weird, so you should do a perfectly classic intro next time just to mess with us

Navy sailor here: On the plus side, with digital engine readouts for speed and digital (read: inertial) compasses, dead reckoning is WAY more accurate than when this was done with a knotted rope and a shoddy magnetic compass. Navigating on an ever shifting seemingly-infinite flat-on-a-good-day featureless non-euclidean plane is always going to be a problem, complicated by drift but if GPS fails, we can still get a rough sense of where we are. This is something we had to practice, like kinda all the time. They'd make us compare our dead reckoning track on the chart with the quartermaster's astronomically-ascertained position every half hour and I could typically get us within a few miles.

“Can I have a go at your hammer” “Bang bang bang bang bang bang” I laughed so hard...

That “moving the goalposts” joke was top-notch.

"Which in today's money is £20000 plus inflation" That's why I love this series

the TikTok reference at 4:00 is 1 of the most hilarious and genius things I’ve ever seen!

So many history lessons learnt through these videos, with an extra sprinkle of wit and humour 📗 😂

Sir Cloudsey Shovell sounds like the name of a villain in a children’s program.

I hope "End of the Movie" will be on Jay's upcoming "Songs that Sound Like but Aren't the Beatles' Songs Album" album.

H1, H2, H3 and H4 are all at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, in the eastern outskirts of London. H1, H2, and H3 are all kept running, and show amazing precision. H4 does not run, as it depends upon oil for lubrication, so every tick wears it out just a little bit. The book by Dava Sobel is beyond good, it is a superb story.

Maskelyne might be the villain here but the story of the Schiehallion experiment when he weighed a mountain in Scotland, then used that to weigh the Earth, is fascinating... they also invented contour lines in the process, so it's sort of map related.

when I was around 10 or so, I went to your “songs for rotten kids” show in edinburgh, and bought both cds and listened to them on repeat. about 3 years ago i discovered your youtube channel. I am now 17, and hearing “end of the movie” at the end of this video brought back a wave of memories. Thank you Jay Foreman

The problem of longitude would eventually contribute to Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, the precursor to modern computers. Longitude by lunar observation required the use of tables of logarithms, which were calculated and typeset by hand, making them prone to potentially dangerous errors. The Difference Engine (as designed) would not only calculate the tables perfectly, it also had an attached machine for turning those results directly into printing plates, eliminating all sources of human error.

Having the part of Adm. Shovell played by an actual shovel with googly eyes and a bicorne hat was a stroke of genius.

Oh no! Nevil Maskelyne slander! This episode deserves a follow up in the style of "Extra History: Lies" because Dava Sobel's book is very, very unfair to Nevil Maskelyne. 1. The lunar distance method supported by Maskelyne worked and is the basis for The Nautical Almanac, which is still published to this day. 2. Maskelyne never submitted a method to try and win the prize, but did support awarding a partial prize to Tobias Mayer for his calculation of lunar tables. 3. The sextant is still used to this day to calculate longitude using lunar distance, in case electronic timekeepers fail. 4. Maskelyne was not against timekeepers. He supported the watchmaker John Arnold in developing a copy of Harrison's H4 that could be produced in large quantities at a cheaper cost, to support the Admiralty. (John Arnold did better than a copy, he added innovations of his own design that simplified the H4 to make it cheaper and easier to produce, and make it more accurate.)

That child spinning the clock and saying "weeee!" really is art. It should be in a museum.

1:24 This is the origin of the famous quote "Let us not go there--it is a Scilly place".

6:22 best joke.

In Maskelyne's defense, he did develop a cheaper method that worked for less demanding circumstances (using only a sextant rather than a £300+inflation watch), albeit not as accurate as Harrison's. And he was the first person to measure the mass of the earth accurately!

I've read the Story of Shovell hanging a sailer who questioned his navigation skills was actually made up in the 19th century, coming from a local Scilly myth that came about a couple of years after the disaster that a Native sailor to the Isles was punished for saying he recognized the waters but was instead ignored and punished but not hanged. All 800 hands and Shovell were lost when ship HMS Association sank quickly after running aground, no contemporary record of any such sailor existing or being punished or hanged exist. Edit: grammer

Ooh, Encarta. Now that's a name I have not heard in a long, long time.

I don't see anyone pointing out to you guys *_Map Men_***, that at **0:15** that is *NOT* a picture/drawing/illustration of a clock. It is in fact a *Watch* more specifically, a turn of the century (20th) gentleman's pocket watch. As is evident by the watch chain hoop at the tip of the watch and face cover (lid) hinge to the left of the watch face (9 o'clock position). All that being said please continue gentlemen!

When Captain Cook navigated his way to Tahiti for the Transit of Venus in 1769, he used lunar tables prepared by Nevil Maskelyne, and he didn’t have a chronometer. So the ‘lunar distance’ method worked well, to the extent that £3,300 was paid to the people who developed it at the same time as Harrison was promised his £20,000. Unfortunately Dava Sobel treated Maskelyne as a pantomime villain because it made a good story.

2:08 If anybody is wondering how much that money would be now, it would be £3,994,609 or $5,554,503

£20.000+inflation would be around £3.400.000 now. Or about $4.700.000 or €4.000.000

I am so proud to have come from a long line of seamen...those early days of exploration must have been long and hard

You forgot the story of Harrison's 6th watch which was found by 2 market traders in the mid 90s and sold at auction for £6.2mil

This channel shoud get the no. 1 prize in british humor competition. Delightful to learn from such witty storytellers.

am a watchmaking apprentice. the precision of watches used for navigation is insane. it is disappointing that there is no more demand for them though - mechanical watches are still popular, but some complications just aren't really needed anymore.

This might be my favorite informative series on RU-vid. The time between each upload just means quality is guaranteed every single time. Love what ya do from Alaska!

Thank you for doing an episode on this. I wrote a report on "The Longitude Problem" in 8th grade, and why it was so important. No one knew what the hell I was talking about

I work at the Royal Observatory! So happy that you got to talk about the chronometers that reside within it!

I'm calling my clock "chronometer" from now

3:15 eh, nowadays you have people who believe that some stones have magical abilities, believe that the earth is flat, and believe in astrology. The concept of dog wifi doesn't even faze me anymore.

“He died the same date he was born” might sound like a lot, until you say “he died on his birthday”

And a little over 200 years after his death his watch made it way to 2 brothers in Peckham who when they sold it at auction became millionaires

Men Map however, is an 1800’s version of Grindr. “We’re the map, and here’s the men!”

Love the video, but as a Dane I have to point out, that none of the gentlemen Galileo, Newton, Halley or Cassini found the speed of light. Though Galileo tried, all his attempts failed. The first to measure the speed of light - or as he called it (translated from Danish) "the hesitation of light - was the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer in 1676. In the book "Opticks" published in 1704 Newton reported about Rømers calculations. But Rømer was the first. :-)

john harrison’s story is so wholesome. i love that it had a happy ending

All of you talking about the tik tok joke but is anyone going to talk how 3:46 is the cutest thing ever.

I think my heart stopped when the Map Men theme did.

0:37 "kind of like the triwizard tournament except no, not at all"

4:07 And then there is my microwave with a digital clock that drifts by half an hour a day. Clearly designed for boats and not stationary houses.

I'm waiting for the day they'll say "We're the map, and here's the man", an then they just show a completely unrelated person.

One thing though; the story of a sailor being hanged for pointing out to Admiral Shovell that they were about to hit the rocks off Scilly is a myth.

Loved the video and how often you made us pause to fully take in one of the little details you added. You guys are amazing.

John Harrison has been for a long time one of my science heroes. And I find interesting that it was his experience as a maker of wooden clocks that allowed him in the end to being able to create a chronograph that worked in all kinds of whether, because of his knowledge that certain types of wood have natural oils and so his wooden clocks were self-lubricating. And so need for using other oils that created a lot of gunk and where the variation in wood properties, if not lubricated, would affect the accuracy of those clocks. That serendipitous knowledge put him on the right path to solve a key issue to develop a clock that worked at sea and in all kinds of whether.

1:30 Dava Sobel in Longitude should not have reprinted the myth of Shovell having a man hanged. There's never been any evidence of such a thing, and it likely grossly mutated from a story about a sailor local to the Scilly Isles recognizing the shallows and trying to warn leadership but being rebuked.

you guys have mastered the art of sponsored segments

This series is absolutely fantastic. I do not have the words to appreciate it. Please keep on it. Hate to think yall have broken up

I love your videos! I almost always watch a second time so I can pause on the funny bits that pop up too fast for me to read. Thanks for making these! :)

The thing about Shovell hanging a sailor for trying to correct his navigation is just a myth unfortunately

Ironically, ‘sympathy dog’ predicted ‘quantum entanglement’ by some 300 years…

I absolutely love your sense of humor! Congrats on this awesome docu-series! Keep up the good work!

Honestly some of the best humorous whilst factual writing on the platform! **moves goalposts**

By the look of the “advert” at the end, I’m assuming that they are big fans of the Mighty Boosh.

I only knew this because of Only Fools and Horses, as is true of many things.

If you want to learn more about John Harrison, watch this excellent BBC documentary from 2012. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-T-g27KS0yiY.html

3:59 Besides the TikTok reference, I loved the little thing about how when you draw a clock and you put too much space between the numbers early on so you have to pack in the last numbers.

For Americans, replace "Yorkshireman" with "hillbilly" and you'll begin to grasp why the Astronomer Royal et al hated Harrison so much, and figured his clock must be crap. I saw a re-enactment at the Greenwich Royal Observatory and Harrison's accent instantly clued me to a whole dimension of the story that was easy to gloss over otherwise.

Next week: "How to tell the time of day with a map"

0:52 Rejected exam question: Using the angle of the dangle-

Seeing Harrison's clocks at Greenwich was one of my top experiences visiting UK. OK, I'm a nerd... the beer in the local pub wasn't too bad either.

“Seamen” Ah yes, what else would I think besides that?

Some day I'll be mature enough to not laugh at "seamen"

6:19 Jay's delivery should qualify him for any role in any piece of media as the announcer of someone not returning home after work/school/travel the day before

i get soo excited every time a new vid of you guys show up. love your content

“Can I have a go on your hammer? Bang bang bang bang bang.” - King George III

ahh yes dead reckoning...the best terminology for guessing

Just when i thought you guys reached peak performance with your intro you step up the game like this. I love it

Your caption formatting is beautiful. Also everything else about this video too

0:18 It's a watch

Dava Sobel's "Longitude" is one of only two books I've managed to read cover-to-cover twice in one sitting.

In fact, during the golden age of big screen (cinema) movies, they always put a big "The End" at the end. Seriously. If Hollywood wasn't in America but in Holland, the words would just be: "Get Out, make room for more paying customers."

Very funny and well explained. The Dava Sobel book on Longitude is a good read, glad you mentioned it.

“…last for centuries. Give or take a few minutes.” Choose your own hyperbolic, though somehow also very true, response. Hint: they all apply. *chef’s kiss* - im ded - lol - rofl - epic - sensible chuckle

6:00 Big funny

*starts singing along the chorus in my head* Map men Map men- *gets confused* *oh you* *you got me - again* - keep the show running U guys rock

John Harrison is from my hometown, Barrow-upon-Humber. The primary school is named after him, and there's a life-size bronze statue of him in the village square. And a bench.

The credits song was beautiful!

0:05 how did you even get sponsored

The video and ad at the end are both perfection! GG

Discovered this channel today, love the writing!

the only channel where we actually watch the sponsor segment 😂

7:00 litteraly 1984

I don't know wny, yours are the kind of video I'll watch time and time again, just to listen to, even though I know (almost) the whole video by heart. Usually there's something new I haven't seen or heard before...

Legitimately loved this. Even your commercial at the end was hilarious. Love this guys!!

What a great way to start this morning!

Ah yes, reading that Longitude book in highschool really payed off here 6:42 yup that's the one

And I've ALWAYS WONDERED why on older ship decks there's this weird fascination with clocks...

Amazing work guys, one of your funniest yet