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How was GMT originally established ?
From: Patrick Stanistreet
Date: 2004 Jan 28, 14:49 -0800
From: Patrick Stanistreet
Date: 2004 Jan 28, 14:49 -0800
Just curious but when Harrison created his chronometers there had to be some standard against which they were set. Of course land based clocks were around but even those clocks had to be set against some other standard. I would guess that the ultimate standard at that time would have been astronomical. But still what exactly was used to arrive at accuracy of a few seconds. Was the land based authority setting GMT associated with the Almanac office? Assuming timing of a star one ends up with a sidereal clock but when did land based clocks achieve sufficient accuracy to time a star over 24 or more hours so as to differentiate between sidereal and solar time? Any book recommendations that cover this topic in detail?