--- title: Who Is John Harrison? Why Google Celebrates the Clockmaker description: John Harrison revolutionized seafaring in the 18th century by allowing sailors calculate their longitude at sea canonical: https://time.com/5225772/john-harrison-longitude/ author: Eli Meixler article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-04-03T08:05:35.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T20:48:38.000Z og:title: Who Is John Harrison? Why Google Celebrates the Clockmaker og:description: After 7 years of tinkering, in 1735 Harrison created the marine chronometer og:url: https://time.com/5225772/john-harrison-longitude/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf4ef4c4feec002b7/69892cae0a4a22f0c39d24b8/john-harrison-longitude.jpg?branch=production&width=757&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 757 og:image:height: 426 og:image:alt: john-harrison-longitude og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Who Is John Harrison? Why Google Celebrates the Clockmaker twitter:description: After 7 years of tinkering, in 1735 Harrison created the marine chronometer twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf4ef4c4feec002b7/69892cae0a4a22f0c39d24b8/john-harrison-longitude.jpg?branch=production&width=757&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Who Is John Harrison? Why Google Is Celebrating the English Clockmaker > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME The Brief: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition The Brief is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The day's top headlines, curated by TIME editors. The Brief brings TIME's perspective to the day's most important stories, helping readers understand not just what is happening, but why it matters. It combines original reporting and analysis with the best of TIME, spanning politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. 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Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-brief-2026q3/newsletters?i=a15a039c-5978-4c45-b94e-ab62cb0b1a05&cr=time-nl-brief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 8:48 PM UTCPublished: Apr 3, 2018 8:05 AM UTC  Credit: Google Credit: Google by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 8:48 PM UTCPublished: Apr 3, 2018 8:05 AM UTC English clockmaker John Harrison revolutionized long distance seafaring in the 18th century, solving the problem of calculating longitude at sea and devising tools that helped sailors navigate with precision. Today, on what would have been [Harrison’s 325th birthday](https://www.google.com/doodles/john-harrisons-325th-birthday), Google is celebrating the legendary horologist with a special Doodle.  John Harrison, (1693-1776). Inventor of the marine chronometer in 1757\. A self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea. He was awarded a government prize for its accuracy Heritage Images - Getty Images In Harrison’s time, seafaring was dangerous. So much so that, after four ships and 1,300 sailors were lost in the [Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707](https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/1707-isles-scilly-disaster-%E2%80%93-part-1) , the British Parliament offered a £20,000 reward to anyone who could devise a way to calculate longitude at sea. Harrison, a self-taught carpenter, took up the challenge.  Google Doodle > [](https://twitter.com/longitude%5Fprize/status/981118124341780480) After 7 years of tinkering, in 1735 Harrison created the marine chronometer, a timekeeping device that was powered not by gravity, but by the motion of a ship. It was so accurate that it could be used by sailors as a portable time standard, who compared their local time to Greenwich Mean Time to calculate longitude, or east-west location on the Earth.  John Harrison's third marine chronometer, 1757\. John Harrison (1693-1776), English inventor and horologist, discovered the means by which longitude could be determined accurately. He developed a marine chronometer which, in a voyage to Jamaica determined the longitude within 18 geographical miles Science and Society Picture Library - SSPL via Getty Images Time has looked kindly on Harrison’s inventions: In 2015, the Guinness World Records’ association declared one of his clocks projects the most accurate swinging pendulum clock in the world. The project drew ridicule when Harrison boasted it would still be accurate within a second after 100 days of ticking; 250 years later, he was proven right. > [](https://twitter.com/RMGreenwich/status/981097729974824960) > [](https://twitter.com/AlbertEinstein/status/981137990922612736) ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. And, you know, we keep making more and more of these things. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5225772/john-harrison-longitude/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5225772/john-harrison-longitude/"},"headline":"Who Is John Harrison? 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