Innovations That Led to Navigational Certainty

Going back even further, the work by clock maker John Harrison was astounding. He solved the problem of navigation at sea in the early 18th century by designing a marine chronometer, which provided an accurate determination of longitude. Not only did his marine chronometers get increasingly more accurate as he developed his technology, he was able to miniaturize the mechanisms from the size of a kitchen table to the size of a pocket watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

Fully concur. This is a good book.

Amazing! Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

Thanks for the link to the book!

Yes, this is a book about the John Harrison I discussed above. It's a fascinating story.

There was a prize which would amount to millions of today's dollars to solve the "longitude problem". A $10 quartz watch which can be bought today would far exceed what would be necessary!

All I know about this invention is related to the history of WWII aviation. Pilots of wildcat (F4F) airplanes in the Pacific Theater of War had to fly some seriously long flights full of boredom, many sorties per day at times. While in formation some pilots would fall asleep literally dozing off, and the squadron leader would have to them, "Jones! Wake up and fly!". The only remedy they found for this was to take a strip of rubber, and loop it over the stick, then tie off the ends with even tension. As long as the sleepy fellow's feet stayed off the rudder, and he already had dialed in his trim, and throttle and rpm settings, and the prop was not feathered, he was good. Once in a while the commander would still call out for "tighten up that formation".

The boredom was quickly overcome when planes with the rising sun appeared. 5-10 minutes of sheer terror ensued. The lucky survivors then spent the remainder of their flight navigating back where they came from, and searching for a small dot in the vast ocean that was the flight deck. The greater fear being sharks, and not necessarily the Japanese fighter pilots.