Portal:Time/Selected biography archive/2008

Selected biography

John Harrison (24 March 1693 – 24 March 1776) was an English clockmaker. He invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought and critically-needed key piece in solving the problem of accurately establishing the East-West position, or longitude, of a ship at sea, thus revolutionising and extending the possibility of safe long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail. The problem was considered so intractable that the British Parliament offered what was at the time a huge fortune for a solution, a prize of £20,000 (roughly £6 million or €7.7 million in 2007 terms).

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Selected biography

Bede (also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, or (from Latin) Beda) (c. 672 or 673 – May 25, 735), was a Benedictine monk... He is well known as an author and scholar, and his most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) gained him the title "The father of English history"... His work On the Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione) included an introduction to the traditional ancient and medieval view of the cosmos, including an explanation of how the spherical earth influenced the changing length of daylight, of how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon influenced the changing appearance of the New Moon at evening twilight, and a quantitative relation between the changes of the Tides at a given place and the daily motion of the moon.

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