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An early piece of navigation technology was used by the Vikings. It was a rod sticking up from a flat piece of wood. The length of the shadow of the rod indicated latitude.

A later development was the octant, followed by the sextant, which was a much more accurate means of measuring lattitude.

However, the most significant development was the nautical chronometer, developed by John Harrison, culminating in him being awarded a prize of

£20,000 in 1773.

The problem was that clocks at that time were all gravity based, and the earth's gravity is not uniform all over the planet, added to which the rolling and pitching of a ship altered the direction of gravity.

Accurate adjustment of a nautical chronometer before a trip is crucial, so an observatory was established at a place called Greenwich near London. This observatory was used to observe the sun and the stars in order to establish the exact time, and every day at exact noon, a ball would slide down a rail so that all the ships anchored in the river could synchronoze their chronometers. This is the origin of the ball-drop in Times Square New York on new year midnight.

This in turn led to the zero lattitude line being established passing through Greenwich, much to the annoyance of the French.

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