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300-Year-Old Clock Design Wins Guinness World Record For Accuracy

In the 18th century, the idea was dismissed as the mad ravings of an old man

Experts at the National Maritime Museum check the clock
Experts at the National Maritime Museum check the clock


A pendulum clock designed 300 years ago has been certified as the world’s most accurate in its class by time-keeping experts from Guinness World Records.

The pendulum clock design was created in the the 18th century - but never built, and a book describing the technique was dismissed as the ‘ramblings’ of an old man.  

Its creator, famous clock designer John Harrison had boasted that it would be not gain or lose a second in 100 days - a preposterous idea at the time.

But when horology experts at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory built the clock from Harrison’s design within a perspex case, and monitored it against the speaking clock, he was right.

Harrison is world-famous as the inventor of the first clock accurate enough to permit British ships to navigate past the Equator, chronicled in the bestselling book Longitude.

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‘It was a claim that Harrison made and a claim nobody believed because the best clocks of the day couldn’t do better than about a second a week, if they were lucky,’ said Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory.

'So the idea that somebody was going to keep time to an accuracy of a second in a 100 days was preposterous.

‘It was only in the 20th century that people thought that Harrison may have been right.

‘As soon as we set the clock running it was clear that it was performing incredibly well, so then we got the case sealed because nobody was going to believe how well the clock was running.'