Prizes and exploration
01/08/13 05:36
There have been several times when technological advances have come from the offering of prizes. Lindbergh made his Atlantic crossing in part in quest of the $25,000 Orteig prize. Several famous aviators made unsuccessful attempts at the New York to Paris nonstop before Lindbergh succeeded.
The XPrize provided the motivation for a new generation of privately-funded space exploration and a new XPrize is being offered for a successful human return to the earth. The XPrize foundation is also funding prizes for a new generation of digital medical records, world exploration, global development and education.
Prizes to fund technological developments are not new.
The 1714 parliament and parsons act in Britain established a series of prizes for a portable system of determining longitude that could be used aboard a ship rolling on the seas. The amount of the prize, up to 20,000 British Pounds, was determined by the accuracy of the method that was developed. The act also provided funds for subsidies for entrepreneurs in their efforts to develop navigational tools. Prior to the offering of the prize it was felt that someone who was searching for the solution to the longitude method was searching for the impossible. There is a famous etching of the Bedlam Asylum that depicts a longitude lunatic.
In the 1700’s the problem of determining longitude became urgent. Longitude is the distance, east or west, from a fixed point on the globe. It is important to note that the urgency of this navigational conundrum wasn’t because sailors were constantly getting lost. There were many successful far-reaching sailing expeditions prior to that time. Global discovery had made huge progress before the development of successful, simple longitude measurements.
The motivation for the prize was almost purely economic. There was great wealth to be had in the shipping trade. The slave trade and the sugar trade were enormous motivators behind the prize. The ability to determine longitude also had significant military applications in the age of great navies and piracy on the high seas.
At the time Greenwich Observatory was the center of scientific and geographic exploration in Britain. The head of the Greenwich Observatory was a member of the board of longitude. It was a director of the observatory, Nevil Maskelyne, who developed the first nautical almanac in 1766. The almanac provided the data required for the method of lunar distances, a mathematically complex method of determining longitude in a time before precise timepieces were available to know exact times. By using the almanac, you could look up where the moon was in relationship to certain known stars at a certain distance from Greenwich and then you could determine you position east or west from Greenwich.
The almanac, however, didn’t provide the complete solution to the problem. Two additional pieces of technology were required. Telescopes of the day, used for viewing and measuring angles in the sky, were long and very difficult to hold by hand on the deck of a ship on the ocean. The constant motion of the ship make it impossible to fix the instrument to the ship and trying to compensate for the motion of the ship by the movement of the body made it extremely difficult to make precise measurements. The sextant could be held with one hand and used to measure accurate angles between the moon and other celestial bodies. The instrument gets its name from the fact that the instrument has length of turn of one quarter of a circle or 60 degrees. The first sextant was made by a glazier in Philadelphia, John Bird in 1757.
The second technological problem was the lack of accurate portable timepieces. Knowing the local time and also the time at Greenwich was impossible before the development of accurate marine chronometers. John Harrison made the first accurate and reliable clocks that could maintain Greenwich time.
The famous explorer James Cook undertook a series of expeditions that were in part tests of the new methods of navigation. His voyages tested the almanacs, sextants and chronometers that were being developed. The astronomer William Wales was a crewmember aboard The Resolution who kept very accurate records of his observations. The charts drawn during that expedition were among the most accurate of their day.
The Board of Longitude eventually went into the business of providing chronometers for navigation. The “sea watches” were extraordinarily valuable and precious. Losing such an instrument was a disaster. William Bly, captain of the Bounty wrote a letter to the Board of Longitude explaining that the sea watch entrusted to him had been taken by the mutineers.
In the end, the prize for longitude was never awarded. The problem was sufficiently complex that it took multiple technological advances by multiple people to solve it. It could be argued that Nevil Maskelyne, John Bird, and John Harrison all had a right to a portion of the price for their developments of the almanac, the sextant and the chronometer. Harrison went to his grave believing that he had been cheated out of the prize. His clocks were extremely accurate and portable. The Board of Longitude determined that they were so expensive and so rare that they couldn’t be supplied in sufficient number to solve the problem. It took Harrison about six years to complete a single timepiece.
Regardless of the outcome, the promise of the prize was a factor in the advancement of technology as can be demonstrated by Harrison’s anger at the dispute over the award.
These days, with Global Positioning Satellites and hand-held navigational devices, people don’t remember how difficult it was to determine position in years past. The art of measuring angles with a sextant is becoming lost and there are plenty of sailors who don’t know how to read a marine almanac. Times change. Technologies advance and the skills required to accomplish a certain task change with the development of technology.
But we humans remain eager to obtain wealth and the promise of a cash prize continues to motivate the development of new technologies and solutions for long-standing problems.
I shan’t be seeking any of the prizes, but I do pay attention and I do check out the XPrize website from time to time to see what others are doing. The winners are rarely individuals. It takes real teamwork to push the edges of exploration.
The XPrize provided the motivation for a new generation of privately-funded space exploration and a new XPrize is being offered for a successful human return to the earth. The XPrize foundation is also funding prizes for a new generation of digital medical records, world exploration, global development and education.
Prizes to fund technological developments are not new.
The 1714 parliament and parsons act in Britain established a series of prizes for a portable system of determining longitude that could be used aboard a ship rolling on the seas. The amount of the prize, up to 20,000 British Pounds, was determined by the accuracy of the method that was developed. The act also provided funds for subsidies for entrepreneurs in their efforts to develop navigational tools. Prior to the offering of the prize it was felt that someone who was searching for the solution to the longitude method was searching for the impossible. There is a famous etching of the Bedlam Asylum that depicts a longitude lunatic.
In the 1700’s the problem of determining longitude became urgent. Longitude is the distance, east or west, from a fixed point on the globe. It is important to note that the urgency of this navigational conundrum wasn’t because sailors were constantly getting lost. There were many successful far-reaching sailing expeditions prior to that time. Global discovery had made huge progress before the development of successful, simple longitude measurements.
The motivation for the prize was almost purely economic. There was great wealth to be had in the shipping trade. The slave trade and the sugar trade were enormous motivators behind the prize. The ability to determine longitude also had significant military applications in the age of great navies and piracy on the high seas.
At the time Greenwich Observatory was the center of scientific and geographic exploration in Britain. The head of the Greenwich Observatory was a member of the board of longitude. It was a director of the observatory, Nevil Maskelyne, who developed the first nautical almanac in 1766. The almanac provided the data required for the method of lunar distances, a mathematically complex method of determining longitude in a time before precise timepieces were available to know exact times. By using the almanac, you could look up where the moon was in relationship to certain known stars at a certain distance from Greenwich and then you could determine you position east or west from Greenwich.
The famous explorer James Cook undertook a series of expeditions that were in part tests of the new methods of navigation. His voyages tested the almanacs, sextants and chronometers that were being developed. The astronomer William Wales was a crewmember aboard The Resolution who kept very accurate records of his observations. The charts drawn during that expedition were among the most accurate of their day.
The Board of Longitude eventually went into the business of providing chronometers for navigation. The “sea watches” were extraordinarily valuable and precious. Losing such an instrument was a disaster. William Bly, captain of the Bounty wrote a letter to the Board of Longitude explaining that the sea watch entrusted to him had been taken by the mutineers.
In the end, the prize for longitude was never awarded. The problem was sufficiently complex that it took multiple technological advances by multiple people to solve it. It could be argued that Nevil Maskelyne, John Bird, and John Harrison all had a right to a portion of the price for their developments of the almanac, the sextant and the chronometer. Harrison went to his grave believing that he had been cheated out of the prize. His clocks were extremely accurate and portable. The Board of Longitude determined that they were so expensive and so rare that they couldn’t be supplied in sufficient number to solve the problem. It took Harrison about six years to complete a single timepiece.
Regardless of the outcome, the promise of the prize was a factor in the advancement of technology as can be demonstrated by Harrison’s anger at the dispute over the award.
These days, with Global Positioning Satellites and hand-held navigational devices, people don’t remember how difficult it was to determine position in years past. The art of measuring angles with a sextant is becoming lost and there are plenty of sailors who don’t know how to read a marine almanac. Times change. Technologies advance and the skills required to accomplish a certain task change with the development of technology.
But we humans remain eager to obtain wealth and the promise of a cash prize continues to motivate the development of new technologies and solutions for long-standing problems.
I shan’t be seeking any of the prizes, but I do pay attention and I do check out the XPrize website from time to time to see what others are doing. The winners are rarely individuals. It takes real teamwork to push the edges of exploration.