New-Tech Europe Magazine | November 2018

Engineering’s long-term need for outsider talent

Leonie Clayson, DesignSpark Community Manager

Three hundred years ago, the British government had a major problem. The country had survived near bankruptcy under the Tudors but had found fortune on the high seas as it expanded its empire. But the risk of its ships, often through navigational mistakes, being lost remained painfully high. More than 1,500 sailors died when their vessels ran aground in the Scilly disaster of 1707. For centuries, navigators knew how to find their latitude from the position of the sun in the sky. But longitude was much more difficult because they had no way to tell the time accurately. The success of British commerce relied on an engineering breakthrough. But the solutions that came from established scientists were impractical and occasionally bizarre. Two renowned mathematicians proposed launching rockets from ships anchored across the ocean so passing vessels could estimate their distance from the explosions by comparing the flashes and the sound. Shortly afterwards, in 1714, Parliament decided it needed to seek help from further afield and set up the Longitude Prize: offering £20,000 to anyone who could design a more practical system. That meant designing a chronometer that could keep time on a ship being

tossed around by ocean waves. The work took years but John Harrison, who had followed in his father’s footsteps as a carpenter used his long- time interest in clocks to come up with a design that could work reliably on board a ship. Though he never collected the full reward from the Longitude Board, by the start of the 19th Century, mariners came to depend on Harrison’s approach to timekeeping. And songs told of Britain ruling the waves. It is a testament to the way in which engineering ideas that change history can come from anywhere and why it is so important to encourage people to keep making things. Without Harrison’s practical curiosity in disassembling and then designing his own clocks, the longitude puzzle could have taken much longer to solve. Ideas can come from anywhere and can take just as long to become accepted as Harrison’s struggles with both manufacturing and the British government. Two centuries later, Hedy Lamarr worked as an actress. But in her spare time she was a keen inventor. She had no formal training but had been able to meet many scientists and technologists as she became famous for her roles in movies, initially in her native Austria and Europe and

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