In the ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, a pock­et watch could keep rea­son­ably accu­rate time, give or take a minute per day. This may not sound too bad, giv­en how we now regard even the most advanced tech­nol­o­gy of that era. But it cer­tain­ly was­n’t good enough for marine nav­i­ga­tion: each day, a ship could tol­er­ate its clocks gain­ing or los­ing only a cou­ple of sec­onds. With­out prop­er reli­able infor­ma­tion about the time, sailors on the open sea had no way of know­ing quite where they were. More specif­i­cal­ly, the sun told them how far north or south they were, their lat­i­tude, but they did­n’t know how far east or west they were, their lon­gi­tude.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the “lon­gi­tude prob­lem” was eas­i­ly solv­able. You could cal­cu­late it, writes Gear Patrol’s Ed Est­low, “by sight­ing the sun at high noon where you were, and if you had a good enough clock for the time back home, you could com­pare the two and, with some sim­ple math­e­mat­ics, deter­mine your posi­tion.” But engi­neer­ing such a good-enough clock in real­i­ty took about half a cen­tu­ry. “In 1714, the British gov­ern­ment offered the huge prize of £20,000 (rough­ly £2 mil­lion today) to any­one who could solve the lon­gi­tude prob­lem once and for all.” But the mon­ey was­n’t ful­ly claimed until 1773, by a York­shire clock­mak­er John Har­ri­son.

Har­rison’s name looms large in the annals of chronom­e­try, and not with­out rea­son. His work of invent­ing an accu­rate ship clock involved the cre­ation of five dif­fer­ent mod­els, known by his­to­ri­ans as H1 through H5. H1 was a portable ver­sion of the kind of siz­able wood­en clock with which he’d already made his name. It was only in with H4, in 1765, that he real­ized small is beau­ti­ful, or rather accu­rate, at least if equipped with over­sized inter­nal bal­ance wheels to hold up more reli­ably against the con­stant move­ment of a ship at sea. This design worked with­out a hitch, but even so, the Board of Lon­gi­tude only saw fit to award him half the mon­ey offered.

Nei­ther Har­rison’s solv­ing of the lon­gi­tude prob­lem nor his receipt of a dis­ap­point­ing­ly halved prize seem to have stopped his obses­sion with build­ing ever-bet­ter time­keep­ing devices. This comes as no sur­prise giv­en the qual­i­ties of mind that emerge in “The Clock That Changed the World,” the episode of BBC’s A His­to­ry of the World at the top of the post. While work­ing on H5, Har­ri­son “sought the sup­port of King George III” (he of the famous mad­ness). “The King, a nat­ur­al philoso­pher in his own right, test­ed H5 him­self and promised Har­ri­son his sup­port.” That sup­port final­ly got the elder­ly Har­ri­son his promised amount and then some, but one sens­es that — like any pur­suit wor­thy of one’s life­long ded­i­ca­tion — it was nev­er real­ly about the mon­ey.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New Archive Reveals How Sci­en­tists Final­ly Solved the Vex­ing “Lon­gi­tude Prob­lem” Dur­ing the 1700s

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

The Plan­e­tar­i­um Table Clock: Mag­nif­i­cent 1775 Time­piece Tracks the Pass­ing of Time & the Trav­el of the Plan­ets

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Even if you don’t speak a word of Chi­nese, you sure­ly know that the lan­guage uses not an alpha­bet, but ideo­graph­ic char­ac­ters: about 50,000 of them, all told, 3,000 to 5,000 of which must be mem­o­rized in order to achieve rea­son­able lit­er­a­cy. The poten­tial for con­flict between the Chi­nese writ­ing sys­tem and twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy hard­ly needs expla­na­tion. How, in short, do Chi­nese peo­ple type? Youtu­ber John­ny Har­ris offers an expla­na­tion in the video above, begin­ning with the per­haps coun­ter­in­tu­itive answer that Chi­nese peo­ple type with more or less the same key­board every­one else does — when they’re using a com­put­er, at any rate.

Our smart­phone age has giv­en rise to a num­ber of dif­fer­ent input sys­tems, all designed to per­form the same basic task of adapt­ing the ancient and elab­o­rate writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage to dig­i­tal moder­ni­ty. In Har­ris’ telling, these tech­nolo­gies turn on two major devel­op­ments: the cre­ation of pinyin, a ver­sion of the Latin alpha­bet that pho­net­i­cal­ly rep­re­sents Chi­nese char­ac­ters, and the devel­op­ment of algo­rithms that pre­dict which char­ac­ter the user wants to type next.

His expla­na­tion is breezy and not with­out its errors (the dia­gram about thir­teen min­utes in, for exam­ple, actu­al­ly shows the Kore­an alpha­bet), and you might con­sid­er sup­ple­ment­ing it with videos like expa­tri­ate Matthew Tye’s more detailed “How Do Chi­nese Peo­ple Type?” above.

But if you tru­ly want to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of Chi­nese typ­ing, you must begin with the Chi­nese type­writer — and so must read Tom Mul­laney. A Pro­fes­sor of East Asian Lan­guage and Cul­tures at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, Mul­laney pub­lished The Chi­nese Type­writer: A His­to­ry five years ago, and has more recent­ly been at work on a fol­low-up on the Chi­nese com­put­er. In the lec­ture above, he recounts the Chi­nese type­writer’s once-impos­si­ble-seem­ing devel­op­ment in an hour and a half, con­nect­ing it to a host of cul­tur­al, lin­guis­tic, ortho­graph­ic, and tech­no­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na along the way. It’s a sto­ry of inge­nu­ity, but also of sur­vival. Chi­nese made it through the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry with­out being man­gled or abol­ished to meet the lim­i­ta­tions of West­ern engi­neer­ing, but not every writ­ing sys­tem was quite so lucky.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

Behold the 1940s Type­writer That Could Type in Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Japan­ese: Watch More Than a Thou­sand Dif­fer­ent Char­ac­ters in Action

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Writ­ing: From Ancient Egypt to Mod­ern Writ­ing Sys­tems

When IBM Cre­at­ed a Type­writer to Record Dance Move­ments (1973)

Dis­cov­er the Inge­nious Type­writer That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion: The Keaton Music Type­writer Patent­ed in 1936

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.