Thomas EarnshawDied 1 Mar 1829 at age 80 (born 4 Feb 1749).English watchmaker, the first to simplify and economize in producing chronometers so as to make them available to the general public. In 1782, he devised the spring detent chronometer escapement. He did much to develop the chronometer, and was awarded £3,000 by Board of Longitude. His chronometers were described in a publication by the Commissioners of Longitude in 1806. Forty years after his death, the novelist Jules Verne described Phileas Fogg as, "He gave the idea of being perfectly well-balanced, as exactly regulated as a Leroy or Earnshaw chronometer." |
