London, 25 June 2024

I awoke from my dream, laying on the grass near the Royal Observatory, and couldn’t remember. Was my dream about Churchill starring as Shrek or Shrek starring as Churchill? Fuzzily, I got up and we moved on; naps taken, brains reset.

Reader, today was very hot. I’m not the most acclimated to the heat yet, it’s only been about 10 days at 75 degrees and above, and I’m just hot. We did see a lot of cool stuff, however.

The bulk of today was spent in Greenwich. The Royal Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory, and Queen’s House (whence came the above painting). Museum-going can be extra-good in the heat, if the air condition is working (Maritime Museum yes, the other ones, no).

One of the big displays in the Observatory was Harrison’s clocks (he’s the guy who made clocks that would work on a ship, allowing accurate timekeeping to be used to determine longitude, which was previously really hard to do). I’m not good enough at posting yet to embed videos here, so I’ll just do a narrated list of the three major clocks he made before he figured it all out.

The H1 was pretty much a marvel by itself. The opposing, sprung weights were an attempt to build a pendulum system that would be immune to the rocking of the ship, adjusting itself as one pendulum side went long and the other short.

The H2 might look similar, but had a lot of improvements. Remember that Harrison had to invent pretty much everything here- he was forging new ground in mechanical computation. 

In the H3, we see the first inkling of what was going to really revolutionize things- instead of a pendulum used to keep time, a heavy wheel on a spring that rotates back and forth; similar to a pendulum, but you need to wind and unwind a spring instead. Apparently he knew it wasn’t enough when he finished it, but kept on going.

Anyway, the clock stuff is really cool- there’s something very compelling about clockwork and the very physicality of it, trying to do something super-specific and super-precise, while also having to build your own tools and invent your whole field. Anyway, he died before the prize he earned with this clock was paid out. Because that’s the other half of genius, I think.

There were a couple of short-term displays at the Maritime Museum I liked a lot- the 2022 Astrophotography Awards (Maybe the 2023 ones are being judged?). Some great stuff, nothing I’m reproducing here (copyright to respect and stuff), but here’s the site with winning shots. There was also a room showing off the women of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (they do put “royal” on a lot of things out here), which was rad in a TIL kind of way (I learned about the Lifeboat service in general, that is).

We took boats to and from Greenwich (which, I cannot stress enough, is not some kind of sandwich, although there is a Sandwich in England), seeing the sights of the River Thames from a River Bus operated by Uber Boat operated by Thames Clipper. Boats: cool. Complex corporate naming and private ownership of what probably ought to be a public endeavour? Meh.

Anyway, we got off the boat, headed to do a quick walk-by of Big Ben (we heard it chime 5 pm) and Westminster Abbey, nearly getting flattened by bicyclists. It is something of a philosophical conundrum - if bikes just ride willy-nilly into a pack of pedestrians who are crossing the street with the light, because they are turning at a green signal, who’s got the right of way? Usually the person with the 50 pound ebike barreling down the sidewalk, I guess.

After that, it was a quick jaunt to the local pub for: Fish and Chips, a pint of Cider, and the tail end of the France / Poland match in Euro 2024. Not bad.