Neptune's Needle

Inventor of a marine chronometer capable of maintaining accurate time at sea, which in turn allowed navigator to calculate the longitudinal distance from a fixed ("prime") meridian. Done so in reponse to a 1713 prize established by Parliament in the wake of a shipwreck due to a Navy ship being off course upon entering the English Channel. Such a chronometer only gradually put into shipboard use over the succeeding decades after its successful trial in the 1760s.

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Peter Richards