It took 250 years, but John Harrison finally had the last laugh.
His critics said that his claims about his clocks were laughable. Had he not solved the so-called Longitude Problem in 1765, changing navigation for seafaring forever? And yet when Harrison said that he could make a pendulum clock that was accurate within a second over 100 days, he was ridiculed for “an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity.”
