From Site:
The story of John Harrison the "lone genius" who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea is in urgent need of a rewrite.
Discoveries made during repairs to Harrison's first successful "sea clock" – completed in 1735 – suggest that others contributed to his pioneering timepieces. "Harrison is always cast as a self-taught lone genius pitted against the establishment. The truth is, that is a great over-simplification," says horologist Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London.
Betts dismantled the device – called H1 – after it stopped last year when a connection between a spring and a swinging balance broke. "It's only when you take it apart and have it in your hands that it comes home to you: the story isn't quite the one that's told."
See a gallery of images of H1 that show what Betts found.
Longitude legend... read more here!
[via: http://www.newscientist.com]
