[tbensky]

Happy to see this post on HN. As a college prof, I've spend many years studying the history of 1700s navigation and taking student groups to Greenwich to see and study H1 (H2, H3 and H4). I love these clocks and all of the stories behind them. The serious enthusiast will find a lot of technical details on the Harrison's clocks in this book https://www.amazon.com/Marine-Chronometers-Greenwich-Catalog... and this one https://www.amazon.com/Marine-Chronometer-Its-History-Develo.... I've also collected all of my pedagogy on 1700s navigation into a this book: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Time-Navigation-Tom-Bensky-... where I dive somewhat into the innards of H1. To answer another post: H1 has been fully disassembled and reassembled with XRF done throughout.

[hilbert42]

"...fully disassembled and reassembled with XRF done throughout.

Well, hopefully, that answers my point about the clocks' materials and an XRF analysis. Did that reveal anything of significance?

From points/questions raised by James Stanley and my ignorance of this recent work it seems these facts ought to be more widely known. (Ouch, the price of Marine Chronometers at Greenwich unfortunately has to mean that information is confined to Diehards.)

[jstanley]

Is there a way to buy your "Longitude, Time and Navigation" book as a physical book?

[tbensky]

Hello and thanks for our interested. There's a paperback version here: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Time-Navigation-Tom-Bensky/... (same ed. as the Kindle version).

[kwhitefoot]

XRF?

[tbensky]

XRF=x-ray fluorescence. You shoot X-rays into a metal, typically the gamma rays from an Am-241 source. This causes atoms in the metal to fluoresce their own gamma rays that are a (somewhat) unique signature of the atom itself. So in sum, XRF allow one to non-destructively determine the atomic constituents of a bulk material (but 'heavy' materials..heavier than Silicon for example).