I just hope Battleship New Jersey realizes what a gem they have... in Ryan. He does a wonderful job presenting these videos. He's the best curator/presenter I've ran across on TH-cam. Thank you for all you do to keep the history alive and interesting, Ryan!
Hope he stays there, intend to visit the ship, even though from iowa and happened to be in California I did visit iowa during covid, was just outside at that time.
It’s frustrating how little digital presence so many museum ships have. I attribute this to fact their crew of volunteers and curators (if they even have proper curators) are all on the older end of the spectrum / baby boomers. For example the Lexington doesn’t have any presence on TH-cam or any other social media I’ve seen despite the fact it’s one of the best museum ships I’ve been on. They have a good chunk of the ship open to self guided tours, have an excellent aircraft selection, and an active “live aboard” but is unfortunately limited primarily to scout groups whereas other ships allow individuals: couples / small groups to book a room similar to a hotel. Battleship Cove, which has the Battleship Massachusetts, has a TH-cam channel but only 7,100 subscribers compared to the New Jersey’s 248k. That’s a huge missed opportunity for Battlrship Cove especially considering they’re not a single ship museum like the NJ - they have a highly decorated battleship, the destroy USS Joseph S Kennedy, the WWII submarine USS Lionfish, a former Soviet / E German corvette, AND a bloody PT boat. Battleship Cove has SO MUCH so see and do her like most museum ship it’s, I suspect, run by retirees that aren’t doing all they can to present their museum to the world. This is where Ryan and his team really excel.
History & military producers should hire him to not only speak but provide so much knowledge on Iowa class battleships from the time they were being g built until present day.
Having three is very normal: If you have one and it breaks, now what? If you have two and one breaks, which one is off? I have a US Navy surplus Chronometer, it was made by Waltham, and came in a wooden case, with gymbal mountings so it could roll and pitch without moving the clock. Brass, wind-up. Still keeps pretty good time, but the thing about ships Chronometers isn't that they are accurate, but that they are inaccurate at a known rate: You set them, as perfectly as possible (likely using WWV or something similar) and then with a known rate you can tell how innacurate it becomes on any given following day, and the accuracy is used in part to determine the location using celestial. These days, almost any digital watch is more accurate, and I've circumnavigated the world using just an Omega Seamaster windup and a sextant. Made it home, and was never more than 20 miles off any landfall.
Usually when you have three of a measuring device you always check the reading on three and look to see if they're all the same. If two are the same and one is different than you know that one device has failed
I was on USS Robison DDG-12 from 74 -76, and for a while I was responsible for winding the chronometers when out at sea. (Inport, it was the duty QM.) After winding, Radio Central would patch WWV to the chart house, and I would log the difference from Universal Coordinated Time (it replaced GMT in 1972) for each unit. Once when we went to Subic Bay PI, the chronometers were taken to the base clock shop for cleaning and checkup. I remember one of them was 14 seconds slow comapred to UCT, when they were returned they were dead on time. Exactly like you said, they don't have to keep perfect time, but you have to know the rate they gain or lose. Big surprise, I wasn't aware they went to battery powered units. (Cue the cranky old man, "Back in my day..." lol)
"Sir the officer of the deck sends his respects and reports the approaching hour of twelve noon, all chronometers have been wound and compared, request permission to strike 8 bells on time sir" Just before noon the Quartermaster of the watch said that spiel to the captain
To use the old joke from a joint services cruise: “For any civilians on board, the correct time is 8pm. Any Army, the correct time is 2000 hours. I know there are sailors on board and the correct time is 8 bells. And for you marines, the big hand is on the twelve, the little one on the eight.”
@@JohnSvensson-j6m I was raised in an Army family (and did some service for an allied country) and have lots of friends who were misguided children (USMC), so we have exchanged lots of good punchlines.
Dava Sobel's book "Longitude" tells the story of Englishman John Harrison and how he created the first practical marine chronometers in the early to mid-18th century.
When I was a submarine quartermaster in the late 1960s our three chronometers were probably the original ones issued with the Balao class submarines during WW2. These probably went into mothballs with the submarines after WW2 and remained on board after the subs went thru the GUPPY modernization program. Thus probably still WW2 vintage. I don't remember the maker, but it may well of been Hamilton, thus perhaps three of the +/-13,000 made by them in that era. I would expect that all WW2 US Navy ships had this type of Chronometer. That's about 4,330 groups of three each! There were two different sizes, the "A" one slightly larger that the other two. They were stowed under the outboard seat of the officer's wardroom in the forward battery compartment. Many of our charts were stowed in flat drawers along the aft bulkhead of the wardroom. These chronometers were all in lovely varnished wood hinged cases with no windows into the workings, had polished brass visible components, were hand-wound by the quartermasters on a regular basis, may have been gimbal mounted and were considered delicate! We were able to get accurate GMT time ticks from powerful special radio station WWV in Ft Collins CO to keep accurate records of each chronometer's error. They were not extremely accurate as to keeping the actual time. Instead their ERROR was very consistent. Thus you could still extrapolate an exact time from any of them at any time. We used them primarily in taking stare sightings 1/2 hour after sunset and 1/2 hour before sunrise when only the brightest stars and the horizon were visible. knowing the correct GMT time and the angle of any star up from the horizon would give us one line of position after quite a bit of long-hand (per-calculator) math. Three stars about 30 degrees left or right from one another would yield three lines of position which we hoped would cross to form a small triangle that we were inside of when we took the sightings. LOOK FOR BRASS CHRONOMETERS IS VARNISHED WOOD CASES. What happened to those 13,000 ????
@@tomhenry897 I had a friend who worked in Devonport Dockyard (UK) in the late 70s. On his first day at work, he was shown a crate full of obsolete chronometers and a 3lb lump hammer. His job was to render them all inoperable before lunch.
I think he got latitude and longitude confused. Easy to do. Longitude was the challange and Great Britian i.e. the Royal Navy had the award to develop the means of measuring longitude.. Yep, he just corrected it in the video. Harrison came up with the 1st chronometer.... Drach has a neat video on it. Awesome to learn US Navy ships still use the technology developed in the 1700s. Great video!
When I was touring Greenwich Observatory with my son, visiting their Longitude display and telling the story of how we learned to calculate it, my son said he'd never seen me so excited. They had all of Harrison's clocks there as he tried to make a clock that could work with a ship's rocking. Pendulums were the best way to keep time known, but a ship's rocking prevented them from keeping good time. On his 4th iteration, he worked with a watchmaker to build a modern chronometer.
Drach did an excellent (broadcast TV quality) video on determining longitude, which is what a chronometer is needed for. Latitude can be determined from sun sightings at "local" noon.
You mentioned Hamilton… Hamilton was a US watchmaking company that made wristwatches for the US Military… I say “was” is because it is still in business, but currently located in Switzerland. And they still make field watches. However, being a US company back in the 1940’s and dealing with the US Military they could well have made ships chronometers. Speaking of nautical chronometers, the big deal about them is not that they are incredibly precise (which they are) but, being a mechanical device they are consistent in losing time regardless of the position they are in (ships rock and roll while underway) so that if your chronometer loses 2 seconds a day it’s consistency means that on the (say) fifth day out the navigator knows it’s lost 10 seconds and therefore is able to more precisely locate the ship with minimal error. This is no longer an issue these days since quartz clocks are much more precise (which is why the Ship’s Chronometers you discussed used batteries)
Nowadays, for routine peacetime steaming, they are probably using GPS receivers. However, in time of war - I would imagine that said GPS (and Glonass - the Russian ones) satellites would be among the first ones taken out, so you still need to be able to use the old methods of navigating / dead reckoning. I remember that we were taught that in my Navy ROTC Navigation and Operations I and II (not that I remember how to do celestial navigation anymore - it's been 40 years) . Piloting (when you're close enough to see landmarks (bearings and/or ranges) and have charts) is in comparision pretty simple. As a CIC officer, during seadetail we would be backing up the bridge doing piloting via radar navigation.
Former Quartermaster on a guided missile destroyer: Latitude is north-south location on the globe. Longitude is east-west location. You mentioned sun angles above the horizon using a sextant to determine latitude. And longitude determined by chronometer time when sun at its highest peak above the horizon around noon each day, as measured by a sextant. Precise chronometer time was also essential for shooting stars (celestial navigation), which was used for very precise location of the ship at a given time twice a day. Known bright stars were selected at different points around the ship for sextant readings just before sunrise and after sunset, when both the horizon and brightest stars were visible so the precise vertical angle from the horizon to a specific star could be measured by sextant at a precise instant based on chronometer time. The chronometer time was hand carried on a stop watch for recording the exact time of each star observation in the sequence. Using tables from the Nautical Almanac and other publications used by the Navy, the spherical trigonometry involved was reduced to look-up tables, requiring the navigator to use simple math to work out a line of position for the ship from each star at a given instant. Using measurements from stars all around the ship resulted in lines at different angles, when plotted on the navigation chart, that crossed at one exact point (if all done properly) at the precise time of the observations, as adjusted for the ship’s speed. A three line fix was acceptable, a five or more line five was money. Stars were shot morning and night by the navigator and quartermasters whenever the ship was underway and out of visual or radar sight of land.
He phrased it ambigously: what he said could be interpreted as "on which line running this way you are", in which case he would have been correct. However, I think most people (myself included) would interpret it the other way at first pass.
New Jersey absolutely would have had at least three Hamilton Model 21 chronometers and probably some additional chronometers somewhere other than the chart house. Chronometers were set before leaving port by synchronizing with a time ball drop. When the time ball at the observatory hit bottom, it was high noon. Using a visual signal avoided the delay which would have been unavoidable if, say a pistol, were fired at noon. Of course in more modern days, radio could be used to sync chronometers. Chronometers are adjusted as accurately as possible with weights which screw in and out on the balance wheel. What makes chronometers special is the great care which is taken to keep their rate invariant, even if the rate is not perfectly accurate. The helical spring on the balance wheel is made of temperature compensated metal and a conical fusee style winding mechanism is used to keep tension constant as the mainspring winds down. There is also a backup power spring inside the fusee which keeps ticking accurate while the unit is wound. There is a rating sheet supplied with the chronometer by the USNO which specifies the deviation from perfect of that chronometer’s rate. That correction factor times the number of days since the ship left port is applied when making astronomical observations. As Ryan said, knowing time is critical to determining longitude accurately. Rather than perfection, constancy regardless of temperature or pitching of a ship is the hallmark of an excellent chronometer. I have one of the Hamilton Model 21 chronometers and its transport box which came from the SS Catawba Victory in my collection. There is some provenance from the former owner which allowed me to figure out from whence it came. SS Catawba Victory was named after a college in Georgia, part of a series of names for Victory Ships which were names of US colleges. There were several different themes for names as Victory Ships were hastily built for the war supply effort. If you have a chronometer or want to learn more, I recommend the excellent book, _The Mariner’s Chronometer_ by W J Morris. Edited to correct “Liberty” to “Victory” above.
Drachinifel has a great video about the development of the device called the longitude problem. It was the first video of his I watched and the algorithm eventually led me to this channel.
A valiant effort to explain lat and long, but mixed up. Understandable. It must be a great feeling to find items squirrelled away in little used spaces. What a great job you have! Something new and interesting every day.
As a Navigator of a brand newly commissioned ship in the mid-90s, we had a chronometer table in the charthouse abaft the bridge. The chronometers that we were outfitted with from commissioning were beautiful brass models with equally fancy wooden boxes that fit into similar positions in the table. It was an interesting time to be a Navigator. Over the course of that tour, we began to adopt and regularly use GPS for day-to-day navigation. However, on our maiden deployment, the Junior Officers on the bridge were tasked with getting us from Norfolk to Gibraltar by celestial navigation only. The primary plot was held in Combat Information Center and the positions from the bridge and CIC were compared by the Quartermaster of the Watch and the Navigator on a regular basis. One of my favorite tours of a 25 year career.
When I was in the Navy as a junior quartermaster one of my duties was to wind the chronometers every three days. They were located on the bridge, the captain’s sea cabin, and main engineering.
The ship’s chronometers were compared each day to a radio signal ‘time tick’ broadcast that was received onboard the ship. Any difference between the chronometer time and the exact radio time tick was recorded in a log for each chronometer. The wind-up chronometers were extremely accurate, but over an extended period could still be fast or slow by a number of seconds from the actual, very precise time provided by the radio signal. So that time difference had to be accounted for in the calculations for all celestial navigation position fixes.
Those weren’t chronometers you were winding in those locations. They were just the wind-up ship’s clocks and were in many locations all over the ship. The ship’s chronometers were wound at the same time every day and were only located in gimbal-mount cases in the chart house.
@@Jace-yt2zm my chief called them chronometers and that’s what I did. My ship had no other kind and our chart room certainly didn’t have enough space to house anything like what was shown in the video. The ship I served on was built in the Vietnam War era but technologically it was little different than a World War II vessel. If those weren’t chronometers, then we had none onboard.
Your ship, being a capital ship that would be leading the fleet, would have had the best available. The Hamilton 21 is considered to be the finest of that time, and up until the quartz clocks that you have there. I've worked on 21's and they are quite an impressive time piece!!
Other items for that room. Sextant(s), their cases, charts, and appropriate rulers and scales. Would be great to have a navigating video with all the bells and whistles!
I'd expect there is a "storage locations" document from the ships final decommissioning that you either haven't found or has been lost. Given that the ship was stored with the intention of reactivation, storing needed items not in their use location, and instead stashing them in random places about the ship. would indicate that those storage spaces was documented somewhere so as the crew upon reactivation could easily find them.
During WW2 in the Pacific, LORAN A would have been available for navigation. When reactivated, LORAN C would have been available along with WWV time broadcast. Check radio room and ham operators. The chronometers could have been kept on time to the fraction of second using these sources when radio propagation was ok. LORAN A frequencies would have been stable but have day night variations in WW2.
Interesting. I served aboard Yellowstone in the 80s. She had her own watch and clock shop. I don't know about 1990, but in the mid 80s the clock repairer was a banjo player, so there's no telling what happened to the original chronometers. Said entirely tongue-in-cheek, as he and I used to play banjo together, even though we played drastically different styles, and i was just starting to play.
Modern ships still have a chronometer on board! a single one nowadays, as a back up to all the electronic wizardry. a sextant and a clock can get you home if all else fails.
I'm a bit late to the party here and several folks have made some good and valid points but as someone who services these chronometers(and I own a few) I'll chime in with some random thoughts. First, any ship that was issued a chronometer would probably not keep the same instrument for her lifespan. Chronometers require regular maintenance and as such they would be sent to the Naval Observatory or other approved shop for such work. So not only would the chronometer get separated from the ship, the box(es) that housed it would likewise be separated from the chronometer and get it's own repair as needed. And post-service they would be run for weeks in a variety of temperatures to establish their rate. So it was usually just swapped out for one that was finished with that somewhat lengthy process. Early Hamiltons were given numbered boxes to match the movements but that was soon stopped. Just too much needless hassle to keep them together. Having said that, many of the British and European makers did number their boxes to the chronometer they housed but Hamilton was out to perfect mass production and keeping the chronometer with a particular box didn't matter. The hands of a chronometer were never to be touched once it left the shop/observatory. Someone mentioned a rate card (actually a little book) that was kept with each instrument showing it's error. This was a critical part of the system for precise navigation. Comparing watches were used to carry the time to where the actual sextant readings were recorded. I'm sure that a Navigator will jump in here and correct me if I mis speak about some of the routines followed but the chronometer was disturbed as little as possible. As for serial numbers and what instrument went to what ship, that's a tricky one. The NAWCC Library in Columbia, Pa has the original Hamilton factory records of all the chronometers they produced. So one can take the serial number of the Hamilton chronometer and plug that into the data base and find out the date it was completed, what the rate was, and some other technical information. One can also see the government contract number it was sold under but those numbers won't tell you what ship the instrument was assigned to. The NAWCC has an excellent bi-monthly magazine and there are a couple of authors who have tracked information such as this through the Naval Observatory records, thus assembling the history of a particular chronometer but it is a painstaking process. I would assume that buried somewhere in the mountains of records that must be associated with the New Jersey some record of the chronometers must exist but it would require a lot of digging. Although capitol (or capital) ships did have a well outfitted watchmaker on board so maybe that's a way to look for such information. The Navy outfitted them with a complete kit from an aluminum watchmaker's bench to the necessary tools and even a watchmaker's lathe. But they did not work on the chronometers, just the clocks and I assume whatever other delicate instruments that needed their skill. One other point about the Hamiltons. Many dials have the year 1942 marked on them and people often mistake this for the year the chronometer was made. It is, rather, the year the contract was awarded. The serial number will be marked on the back plate and usually on the dial and this is what we use to date the instrument. It is a fascinating subject and another good if slightly more technical book is Marvin Whitney's The Marine Chronometer. Whitney worked on thousands of chronometers during a long career at the US Naval Observatory and wrote a good book on the subject. I would encourage anyone interested in the subject to check out the NAWCC Museum and Library in Columbia, Pa about two hours west of Philly.
Looking forward to seeing what New Jersey was carrying. In the beginning of the war, with supply lines to Britain and Switzerland cut off, there were several companies that took precision pocket watches and gimballed and boxed them like proper marine chronometers. I don't think these saw use on capital ships.
I have a 1907 Waltham pocket watch that was my grandfather's. I need to spend the money to get it serviced again because it keeps excellent time. In those days, before fancy computers, smart people with slide rules and elbow grease designed the modern world. They paid attention to detail and they knew what they were doing. Then we decided to hurry up. I've always been fascinated with clocks, watches, timekeeping etc.
I would think that chronometers, being precision instruments, would have serial numbers. The military loves serial numbers and matching them to a ship should be possible.
I served on USS Shenandoah AD44. All of the Yellowstone class tenders were decommissioned during the Clinton administration and they were mothballed early as far as the expected & usual service life for Navy Vessels. The fact that you have chronometer from USS Yellowstone isn't surprising.
Drach did an excellent video on the first navigational clocks invented John Harrison. These clocks are no doubt descended from his in terms of concept of function, if not in mechanical design.
Marine chronometers didn't become practicably small until Harrison's H4 in the 1760s, but it was prohibitively expensive. The two subsequent copies cost over £400 each at the time. Prices dropped a decade or two later when John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw set up manufactories and sold chronometers of a much simpler design for ~£50. H4 is unquestionably a masterpiece, but its effectiveness is owed to the intense refinement of a flawed design (the verge escapement, which was standard then) and flawless execution. The later chronometers use an altogether simpler plan which required skill to make correctly, but you didn't need to be a legend to make one.
Marathon makes a great little travel alarm clock that looks a lot like that chronometer. When I was demonstrating my mediocre ability to do celestial navigation in 1988, the Missouri had the old wind-up chronometers in wooden cases, not quartz in plastic. They were wound every morning at the same time and that fact was reported to the OOD, the Navigator, and the Captain. I also wore a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars on the bridge that were made in 1943, probably kept with the ship since it was commissioned.
A friend who recently finished her training as a merchant marine deck officer had to know how to navigate using both "modern" (GPS) and "traditional" (compass, sextant, chronometer) tools, both on electronic and paper charts. The reasoning being that while GPS signals can be messed with the Sun proceeds at a very predictable pace across the sky, and compasses point in the same direction (at least over a few weeks). As to tracing which ship a particular chronometer went to based on the manufacturers data - highly unlikely as the chronometers would be produced "for the navy", and placed into the care of the navy, and the navy would distribute them as required to ships (hopefully keeping track of the recipient ship).
To answer your question at the end, populate the spaces as if the ship had to sail tomorrow. Obviously time correct artifacts are best but functional replacements as good. Perhaps your contacts of crew who served on the Iowa class may have guidance on what was there when she was in service. My 2c
I think some of the objects that make a ship feel alive are the things that can't necessarily be bolted down- binoculars, handheld charts or clipboards, caps, jackets, stuff like that. I think doing things like leaving wax pencil marks on the CEC boards is the right move.
That’s pretty cool that it’s made my Marathon. They have a long history of making time pieces for the military and still do. My favorite watch is a Marathon. They make regular house clocks that somewhat look similar to the chronometer. Just a plain black box and white face.
It would be interesting to see a portion of the ship as it would have been during "a day in the life" as it were. Uniforms in lockers, books and playing cards on bunks, stored food stuffs in every nook and cranny.....
As a young'un with an amateur radio operator license in the late 60s, I always thought it was cool to tune in WWV out of Fort Collins CO. They would broadcast the exact time on a cycle of the hour. I wonder if they are still operating.
It's called "The Longitude Problem" and there was a TV series created called Longitude. The UK Royal Society created the challenge to figure out the longitude - latitude was easy with a sextant as mentioned - but not for longitude as the easy way required a reference to GMT and the current local time (which you can get by finding local noon), calculated from the time difference (earth rotates 15 degrees per hour). The problem was accurate time at sea was basically impossible since ships rolled and pitched and that threw off the the pendulums used in the clocks. Harrison, a clock maker, managed to produce a very accurate clock, but because his background wasn't in science, he was denied for many years (decades?) the prize for solving the problem. These days, your cheap quartz clock or watch rivals the old mechanical chronometers. There is still a chronometer certification available for mechanical clocks and watches, and used as a form of prestige, but like I said, a cheap modern digital quartz clock or watch meets those requirements, which is why you find the mechanical ones in people's houses as clocks as chronometers all got replaced with electric quartz ones. And lets not forget GPS, of course,
You use the constellations that you can see at night to determine your latitude. As you get close to the equator from the North: Polaris (the North Star) will be very low on the horizon for example. Whereas, if you're at the North-pole, Polaris will be almost precisely directly overhead because, the reason it is the North Star is because it's located very near the Northern zenith. As you cross the equator, the horizon will completely obscure Polaris. In the southern hemisphere (because there are no stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye or even with primitive telescopes, there is no particular "Southern star") you generally use constellations like the Southern Cross and the megallanic clouds, etc to do the same thing (but, keep in mind, for stars that aren't directly above one of the poles - they migrate throughout the year as the Earth orbits; so stars near the plane of the Earth's equator - a particular constellation will only be visible for the period of the year when the Earth is on that side of the Sun - so you're looking out, at night, towards the section of our little Milky Way which that star is in). So, at night you can use the stars to figure out where you are North and South. Then, during the day, because the earth's axis of rotation isn't precisely aligned with our plane of orbit around the sun - days obviously vary in length depending on the time of year (get longer during the Summer in your particular hemisphere and shorter in Winter). If you're on the Equator - it's easy: day and night are both 12 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds (not exactly - but close enough for Navy math). So, can use the length of the day to make the same calculation regarding LATITUDE. But, how do you determine LONGITUDE (where you are East to West)??? That's where the chronometer comes in. You need a very precise clock that keeps good time over long periods of time. Because: if you set you're chronometer to be Noon at the precisely Noon at the point from which you left port (or any KNOWN POSITION) you can keep track of when Noon (or dawn or dusk or whatever) at your new position. If Midnight happens when that chronometer says it should be Noon at the place from which you started - congratulations - you've gone exactly half way around the world. You are now at a longitude exactly 180 degrees from the longitude you started at. If relative noon happens when the chronometer says it's 6p where you started, you've gone 1/4 of the way around the world in the Western direction. If relative noon happens at 6am on the chronometer you've gone 90 degree of longitude to the East.
Another calculation you can do - you can say: hey, at this latitude on this date the day should be 10h 48m 13s. If the day ends up being 10h 49m 17s - you can calculate how far you must have traveled to the West to "lengthen" the day by that amount. Conversely, if the day is shorter than it normally is on that date at that latitude - you know that either (1) you've gone East or (2) the Earth has increased it's rotational velocity. And by measuring that change you can figure out how far you must have traveled or the world has sped up.
I still have the chronometer from my great grandfather's last ship, a full rigged downeaster ship, made by Chelse in 1905. Not only does it still run (I'm looking at it as I type here) but it is still in rate -- that is, regardless of the state of winding it goes at a constant rate (sorry; it loses 22 seconds per week, which you have to take into account when you are navigating with it, but it does that year in and year out). No, you can't have it!
Longitude = Like the long sides of a ladder, they run north and south. Latitude = like the rungs of the ladder, they run east to west. Longitude tells you which ladder you are on. Latitude tells you how far up or down you are on that ladder.
Ryan, are you aware of equipment that was taken from an Iowa class to keep the other Iowa's going during the ships' various periods or recommissioning? Thanks for the videos, keep up the great work!
Look ul the TV show "Longitude". It is a great historical novel about the invention of the Ship's Chronometer and the difficulty and methodology of determining Longitude.
I suspect that the chronometers used by the USS New Jersey while in active duty might have been removed during the various times it was decommissioned. In some cases those chronometers might have been placed in other ships but in other cases it might have been misplaced during that process. Also, is that the only location where New Jersey would have had a set of chronometers - especially prior to the Vietnam War?
I am slightly surprised that such precision instruments don't have serial numbers that would allow you to track Where they came from and who they belonged to
They might, but serial numbers don't do much without a reference to call up. That reference may no longer exist or may not be available. You are right, it's just the infrastructure probably isn't there.
@@POVwithRCif there IS a serial number I bet this TH-cam channel can probably get disseminated to the right person that had access to that info. For example the recent bakery video where a viewer submitted the original purchase order for the Hobart mixer.
Why three? Same reason as three attitude indicators (artificial horizon) on a jetliner? In case one is out of sync you go with the two that remain in sync?
He reversed latitude and longitude. Even a soldier like me knows that you compare the reading on the chronometer to local noon (determined by sextant) and that gives you the difference from noon GMT (now called UTC) and since 1 hour's difference means 15 degrees, the hours and minutes different from GMT (UTC) give you the number of degrees and minutes you are from Greenwich.
What to show in a museum ship is complicated, obviously. This is even more the case when the activities in a given space would be a complete mystery to the common visitor. The Disbursing Office is a busy and important places for goldbricks and skylarks, if also essential to Ship's Operation. Navigation stations probably "want" typical items on display, but the art & science of navigation is not the sort of thing a paragraph on an 8x10 placard can sufficiently convey. Dunno.
well, considering the raison d'etre for battleships are to put big guns where theyre needed, a full display of shells and cut aways and info on the gun operations would seem vital to me.
It would be great if you had some charts in the chart room. Hopefully veterans or their families can provide some authentic ones. Or ordinary pleasure boat people could donate some old commercial charts just so you have something to show.
Sobel's book is a good introduction to the subject, but she takes a lot of dramatic license. The TV movie is indeed a fun watch (ba dum tsssss) though the prop department could have applied itself better when it came to the watches (the H4 stand-in was clearly quartz powered). So, enjoy Longitude, but don't stop there :-)
How do you insure the time is set correctly after a dead battery or storage, do the units have a time Sync port? Do you need to take them to The Naval Observatory, NIST, or can you hook the to a GPS time Source?
NJ Probably did not have GPS at end of here active service. I know a former Quartermaster - navigation expert - served ~1987-1993 - talk about his ship having a commercial GPS- and the captain was very picky on who touched it.
@@wfoj2 I bought a commercial GPS unit in 1988, an expensive model ($300?), as a birthday gift for my BIL. It was not that accurate, although plenty good enough for a large ship, and it took a minutes to find the 3 or 4 satellites needed for best accuracy. The one I got had a specialized function for plotting way-points and courses on the water. I can understand a captain being picky about the unit, perhaps his personal device.
@@wfoj2 Wow it's hard to imagin, that a battle ship didn't have GPS, but tanks had at the same time. Regarding the commercial GPS, of the captain, I can understand him. I remember my dad telling me and my brother not to touch it, when he bought his first GPS, also in the early 1990s.
Should the Chronometers be spread out across the Ship,if something happens to that one room, you would have issues Navigating., Even In the Modern Era you would want to check the old fashioned way to guard against GPS spoofing.
No. They should be kept in a very safe, armored place very close to where they are needed for precision charting, they should be stored in a container that insulates them from shock-damage (like the felt-lined box they have). They should be very near the center of the ship so they aren't getting jostled as the ship pitches and rolls and, for the love of God, keep them away from any and all magnetic fields. That box is also designed to be a faraday cage. You use very special, precision winding-tools (basically tiny little torque-wrenches) to tension their movements at set intervals and you station sentries to guard them with their lives. If someone messes those things up it throws off your ability to precise chart where the heck you are on the ocean which in turn leads to errors in your ability to calculate your speed (your speed isn't just the revolutions of the screws - it's about the current, the water temp, the wind, etc) so if you can't calculate your position, you can't plot true speed, which means you can't accurately fire your guns which means your battleship can't do what battleships are supposed to do.
To be fair - I'm sure they had more than 3. The 3 stored in that box would have been the 3 that the Chief Navigator trusted most and/or were in the closest agreement. Even by ww2, these devices were so well built that often you could get a whole bunch of them and their time-keeping would be indistinguishable to the human eye, even over months. I also forgot to mention, the box and their casing are designed to withstand all moisture intrusion and were sealed at a near vacuum probably in a helium chamber so any trace amount of gas that wasn't drawn out would be completely inert. And, during combat conditions, I suspect those precious little boxes were, very cautiously, relocated to the charting room within the armored citadel.
@@Joseph55220 You make some good observations here, Joseph but are quite a bit off with the Helium idea. Chronometers have to be wound with a key that fits onto the winding arbor which requires access to the mechanism. There is no way to hermetically seal them, at least not the mechanical ones.
A video about chronometers? Well, it's about time!
I just hope Battleship New Jersey realizes what a gem they have... in Ryan. He does a wonderful job presenting these videos. He's the best curator/presenter I've ran across on TH-cam. Thank you for all you do to keep the history alive and interesting, Ryan!
Hope he stays there, intend to visit the ship, even though from iowa and happened to be in California I did visit iowa during covid, was just outside at that time.
If anyone is making a list of museum sites who have unleashed their curators, the National Railway Museum is doing that for trains.
It’s frustrating how little digital presence so many museum ships have. I attribute this to fact their crew of volunteers and curators (if they even have proper curators) are all on the older end of the spectrum / baby boomers.
For example the Lexington doesn’t have any presence on TH-cam or any other social media I’ve seen despite the fact it’s one of the best museum ships I’ve been on. They have a good chunk of the ship open to self guided tours, have an excellent aircraft selection, and an active “live aboard” but is unfortunately limited primarily to scout groups whereas other ships allow individuals: couples / small groups to book a room similar to a hotel.
Battleship Cove, which has the Battleship Massachusetts, has a TH-cam channel but only 7,100 subscribers compared to the New Jersey’s 248k. That’s a huge missed opportunity for Battlrship Cove especially considering they’re not a single ship museum like the NJ - they have a highly decorated battleship, the destroy USS Joseph S Kennedy, the WWII submarine USS Lionfish, a former Soviet / E German corvette, AND a bloody PT boat.
Battleship Cove has SO MUCH so see and do her like most museum ship it’s, I suspect, run by retirees that aren’t doing all they can to present their museum to the world. This is where Ryan and his team really excel.
Seattle aviation museum has a series called something like "Curator on the Loose"
History & military producers should hire him to not only speak but provide so much knowledge on Iowa class battleships from the time they were being g built until present day.
Having three is very normal: If you have one and it breaks, now what? If you have two and one breaks, which one is off?
I have a US Navy surplus Chronometer, it was made by Waltham, and came in a wooden case, with gymbal mountings so it could roll and pitch without moving the clock. Brass, wind-up. Still keeps pretty good time, but the thing about ships Chronometers isn't that they are accurate, but that they are inaccurate at a known rate: You set them, as perfectly as possible (likely using WWV or something similar) and then with a known rate you can tell how innacurate it becomes on any given following day, and the accuracy is used in part to determine the location using celestial.
These days, almost any digital watch is more accurate, and I've circumnavigated the world using just an Omega Seamaster windup and a sextant. Made it home, and was never more than 20 miles off any landfall.
Usually when you have three of a measuring device you always check the reading on three and look to see if they're all the same. If two are the same and one is different than you know that one device has failed
I was on USS Robison DDG-12 from 74 -76, and for a while I was responsible for winding the chronometers when out at sea. (Inport, it was the duty QM.) After winding, Radio Central would patch WWV to the chart house, and I would log the difference from Universal Coordinated Time (it replaced GMT in 1972) for each unit. Once when we went to Subic Bay PI, the chronometers were taken to the base clock shop for cleaning and checkup. I remember one of them was 14 seconds slow comapred to UCT, when they were returned they were dead on time. Exactly like you said, they don't have to keep perfect time, but you have to know the rate they gain or lose. Big surprise, I wasn't aware they went to battery powered units. (Cue the cranky old man, "Back in my day..." lol)
"Sir the officer of the deck sends his respects and reports the approaching hour of twelve noon, all chronometers have been wound and compared, request permission to strike 8 bells on time sir" Just before noon the Quartermaster of the watch said that spiel to the captain
Permission granted.
To use the old joke from a joint services cruise: “For any civilians on board, the correct time is 8pm. Any Army, the correct time is 2000 hours. I know there are sailors on board and the correct time is 8 bells. And for you marines, the big hand is on the twelve, the little one on the eight.”
Boyyyyy, do I remember doing this
@@stuartwald2395love it, never heard this one before
@@JohnSvensson-j6m I was raised in an Army family (and did some service for an allied country) and have lots of friends who were misguided children (USMC), so we have exchanged lots of good punchlines.
Dava Sobel's book "Longitude" tells the story of Englishman John Harrison and how he created the first practical marine chronometers in the early to mid-18th century.
There is also a superb TV documentary based on that book.
That is a fascinating read.
When I was a submarine quartermaster in the late 1960s our three chronometers were probably the original ones issued with the Balao class submarines during WW2. These probably went into mothballs with the submarines after WW2 and remained on board after the subs went thru the GUPPY modernization program. Thus probably still WW2 vintage. I don't remember the maker, but it may well of been Hamilton, thus perhaps three of the +/-13,000 made by them in that era. I would expect that all WW2 US Navy ships had this type of Chronometer. That's about 4,330 groups of three each!
There were two different sizes, the "A" one slightly larger that the other two. They were stowed under the outboard seat of the officer's wardroom in the forward battery compartment. Many of our charts were stowed in flat drawers along the aft bulkhead of the wardroom.
These chronometers were all in lovely varnished wood hinged cases with no windows into the workings, had polished brass visible components, were hand-wound by the quartermasters on a regular basis, may have been gimbal mounted and were considered delicate! We were able to get accurate GMT time ticks from powerful special radio station WWV in Ft Collins CO to keep accurate records of each chronometer's error. They were not extremely accurate as to keeping the actual time. Instead their ERROR was very consistent. Thus you could still extrapolate an exact time from any of them at any time.
We used them primarily in taking stare sightings 1/2 hour after sunset and 1/2 hour before sunrise when only the brightest stars and the horizon were visible. knowing the correct GMT time and the angle of any star up from the horizon would give us one line of position after quite a bit of long-hand (per-calculator) math. Three stars about 30 degrees left or right from one another would yield three lines of position which we hoped would cross to form a small triangle that we were inside of when we took the sightings.
LOOK FOR BRASS CHRONOMETERS IS VARNISHED WOOD CASES. What happened to those 13,000 ????
“…tick, tick, tick, tick, at the tone, the time will be 22 hours, 21 minutes, Coordinated Universal Time, tick, tick, tick, BONG, tick, tick, tick…”
Lamps or scrap
@@tomhenry897 I had a friend who worked in Devonport Dockyard (UK) in the late 70s. On his first day at work, he was shown a crate full of obsolete chronometers and a 3lb lump hammer. His job was to render them all inoperable before lunch.
I think he got latitude and longitude confused. Easy to do. Longitude was the challange and Great Britian i.e. the Royal Navy had the award to develop the means of measuring longitude.. Yep, he just corrected it in the video. Harrison came up with the 1st chronometer.... Drach has a neat video on it. Awesome to learn US Navy ships still use the technology developed in the 1700s. Great video!
When I was touring Greenwich Observatory with my son, visiting their Longitude display and telling the story of how we learned to calculate it, my son said he'd never seen me so excited. They had all of Harrison's clocks there as he tried to make a clock that could work with a ship's rocking. Pendulums were the best way to keep time known, but a ship's rocking prevented them from keeping good time. On his 4th iteration, he worked with a watchmaker to build a modern chronometer.
Drach did an excellent (broadcast TV quality) video on determining longitude, which is what a chronometer is needed for. Latitude can be determined from sun sightings at "local" noon.
Or by measuring the altitude of the North Star, which requires no math.
You mentioned Hamilton… Hamilton was a US watchmaking company that made wristwatches for the US Military… I say “was” is because it is still in business, but currently located in Switzerland. And they still make field watches. However, being a US company back in the 1940’s and dealing with the US Military they could well have made ships chronometers. Speaking of nautical chronometers, the big deal about them is not that they are incredibly precise (which they are) but, being a mechanical device they are consistent in losing time regardless of the position they are in (ships rock and roll while underway) so that if your chronometer loses 2 seconds a day it’s consistency means that on the (say) fifth day out the navigator knows it’s lost 10 seconds and therefore is able to more precisely locate the ship with minimal error. This is no longer an issue these days since quartz clocks are much more precise (which is why the Ship’s Chronometers you discussed used batteries)
Hamilton absolutely made most of the chronometers used by the US Navy during WWII.
Nowadays, for routine peacetime steaming, they are probably using GPS receivers. However, in time of war - I would imagine that said GPS (and Glonass - the Russian ones) satellites would be among the first ones taken out, so you still need to be able to use the old methods of navigating / dead reckoning. I remember that we were taught that in my Navy ROTC Navigation and Operations I and II (not that I remember how to do celestial navigation anymore - it's been 40 years) . Piloting (when you're close enough to see landmarks (bearings and/or ranges) and have charts) is in comparision pretty simple. As a CIC officer, during seadetail we would be backing up the bridge doing piloting via radar navigation.
Former Quartermaster on a guided missile destroyer: Latitude is north-south location on the globe. Longitude is east-west location. You mentioned sun angles above the horizon using a sextant to determine latitude. And longitude determined by chronometer time when sun at its highest peak above the horizon around noon each day, as measured by a sextant. Precise chronometer time was also essential for shooting stars (celestial navigation), which was used for very precise location of the ship at a given time twice a day. Known bright stars were selected at different points around the ship for sextant readings just before sunrise and after sunset, when both the horizon and brightest stars were visible so the precise vertical angle from the horizon to a specific star could be measured by sextant at a precise instant based on chronometer time. The chronometer time was hand carried on a stop watch for recording the exact time of each star observation in the sequence. Using tables from the Nautical Almanac and other publications used by the Navy, the spherical trigonometry involved was reduced to look-up tables, requiring the navigator to use simple math to work out a line of position for the ship from each star at a given instant. Using measurements from stars all around the ship resulted in lines at different angles, when plotted on the navigation chart, that crossed at one exact point (if all done properly) at the precise time of the observations, as adjusted for the ship’s speed. A three line fix was acceptable, a five or more line five was money. Stars were shot morning and night by the navigator and quartermasters whenever the ship was underway and out of visual or radar sight of land.
I knew a QM would be around to set everybody straight 😁
Its about time!
It should be longitude at 8:18. What a great explanation for finding latitude and longitude, though!
He phrased it ambigously: what he said could be interpreted as "on which line running this way you are", in which case he would have been correct. However, I think most people (myself included) would interpret it the other way at first pass.
New Jersey absolutely would have had at least three Hamilton Model 21 chronometers and probably some additional chronometers somewhere other than the chart house. Chronometers were set before leaving port by synchronizing with a time ball drop. When the time ball at the observatory hit bottom, it was high noon. Using a visual signal avoided the delay which would have been unavoidable if, say a pistol, were fired at noon. Of course in more modern days, radio could be used to sync chronometers.
Chronometers are adjusted as accurately as possible with weights which screw in and out on the balance wheel. What makes chronometers special is the great care which is taken to keep their rate invariant, even if the rate is not perfectly accurate. The helical spring on the balance wheel is made of temperature compensated metal and a conical fusee style winding mechanism is used to keep tension constant as the mainspring winds down. There is also a backup power spring inside the fusee which keeps ticking accurate while the unit is wound. There is a rating sheet supplied with the chronometer by the USNO which specifies the deviation from perfect of that chronometer’s rate. That correction factor times the number of days since the ship left port is applied when making astronomical observations. As Ryan said, knowing time is critical to determining longitude accurately. Rather than perfection, constancy regardless of temperature or pitching of a ship is the hallmark of an excellent chronometer.
I have one of the Hamilton Model 21 chronometers and its transport box which came from the SS Catawba Victory in my collection. There is some provenance from the former owner which allowed me to figure out from whence it came. SS Catawba Victory was named after a college in Georgia, part of a series of names for Victory Ships which were names of US colleges. There were several different themes for names as Victory Ships were hastily built for the war supply effort.
If you have a chronometer or want to learn more, I recommend the excellent book, _The Mariner’s Chronometer_ by W J Morris.
Edited to correct “Liberty” to “Victory” above.
You should do a video on non-duty time activities. I don't recall seeing one and search hasn't found any!
Congratulations on bringing the old girl alive just a bit more by finding those chronometers.
I love that your channel is a constant critical thinking challenge!!!
Drachinifel has a great video about the development of the device called the longitude problem. It was the first video of his I watched and the algorithm eventually led me to this channel.
Keep up the good work! Even after the restoration series, you have created very interesting videos!
A valiant effort to explain lat and long, but mixed up. Understandable. It must be a great feeling to find items squirrelled away in little used spaces. What a great job you have! Something new and interesting every day.
As a Navigator of a brand newly commissioned ship in the mid-90s, we had a chronometer table in the charthouse abaft the bridge. The chronometers that we were outfitted with from commissioning were beautiful brass models with equally fancy wooden boxes that fit into similar positions in the table. It was an interesting time to be a Navigator. Over the course of that tour, we began to adopt and regularly use GPS for day-to-day navigation. However, on our maiden deployment, the Junior Officers on the bridge were tasked with getting us from Norfolk to Gibraltar by celestial navigation only. The primary plot was held in Combat Information Center and the positions from the bridge and CIC were compared by the Quartermaster of the Watch and the Navigator on a regular basis. One of my favorite tours of a 25 year career.
Thank you for your service
When I was in the Navy as a junior quartermaster one of my duties was to wind the chronometers every three days. They were located on the bridge, the captain’s sea cabin, and main engineering.
The ship’s chronometers were compared each day to a radio signal ‘time tick’ broadcast that was received onboard the ship. Any difference between the chronometer time and the exact radio time tick was recorded in a log for each chronometer. The wind-up chronometers were extremely accurate, but over an extended period could still be fast or slow by a number of seconds from the actual, very precise time provided by the radio signal. So that time difference had to be accounted for in the calculations for all celestial navigation position fixes.
Those weren’t chronometers you were winding in those locations. They were just the wind-up ship’s clocks and were in many locations all over the ship. The ship’s chronometers were wound at the same time every day and were only located in gimbal-mount cases in the chart house.
@@Jace-yt2zm my chief called them chronometers and that’s what I did. My ship had no other kind and our chart room certainly didn’t have enough space to house anything like what was shown in the video. The ship I served on was built in the Vietnam War era but technologically it was little different than a World War II vessel. If those weren’t chronometers, then we had none onboard.
Your ship, being a capital ship that would be leading the fleet, would have had the best available. The Hamilton 21 is considered to be the finest of that time, and up until the quartz clocks that you have there. I've worked on 21's and they are quite an impressive time piece!!
When asked what the most accurate mechanical timepiece ever mass produced was, George Daniels pointed to a Model 21 on his bench.
The tags are possibly metrology stickers to denote when they were last checked and calibrated, not manufactured.
Other items for that room. Sextant(s), their cases, charts, and appropriate rulers and scales. Would be great to have a navigating video with all the bells and whistles!
Yellowstone was likely USS Yellowstone (AD-41). She was decommissioned in 1996. She was a destroyer tender commissioned in 1980
I'd expect there is a "storage locations" document from the ships final decommissioning that you either haven't found or has been lost. Given that the ship was stored with the intention of reactivation, storing needed items not in their use location, and instead stashing them in random places about the ship. would indicate that those storage spaces was documented somewhere so as the crew upon reactivation could easily find them.
During WW2 in the Pacific, LORAN A would have been available for navigation. When reactivated, LORAN C would have been available along with WWV time broadcast. Check radio room and ham operators. The chronometers could have been kept on time to the fraction of second using these sources when radio propagation was ok. LORAN A frequencies would have been stable but have day night variations in WW2.
Interesting. I served aboard Yellowstone in the 80s. She had her own watch and clock shop. I don't know about 1990, but in the mid 80s the clock repairer was a banjo player, so there's no telling what happened to the original chronometers. Said entirely tongue-in-cheek, as he and I used to play banjo together, even though we played drastically different styles, and i was just starting to play.
Ive been waiting a long time for this video 😉🕰🕰🕰
Modern ships still have a chronometer on board! a single one nowadays, as a back up to all the electronic wizardry.
a sextant and a clock can get you home if all else fails.
I'm a bit late to the party here and several folks have made some good and valid points but as someone who services these chronometers(and I own a few) I'll chime in with some random thoughts.
First, any ship that was issued a chronometer would probably not keep the same instrument for her lifespan. Chronometers require regular maintenance and as such they would be sent to the Naval Observatory or other approved shop for such work. So not only would the chronometer get separated from the ship, the box(es) that housed it would likewise be separated from the chronometer and get it's own repair as needed. And post-service they would be run for weeks in a variety of temperatures to establish their rate. So it was usually just swapped out for one that was finished with that somewhat lengthy process. Early Hamiltons were given numbered boxes to match the movements but that was soon stopped. Just too much needless hassle to keep them together. Having said that, many of the British and European makers did number their boxes to the chronometer they housed but Hamilton was out to perfect mass production and keeping the chronometer with a particular box didn't matter.
The hands of a chronometer were never to be touched once it left the shop/observatory. Someone mentioned a rate card (actually a little book) that was kept with each instrument showing it's error. This was a critical part of the system for precise navigation. Comparing watches were used to carry the time to where the actual sextant readings were recorded. I'm sure that a Navigator will jump in here and correct me if I mis speak about some of the routines followed but the chronometer was disturbed as little as possible.
As for serial numbers and what instrument went to what ship, that's a tricky one. The NAWCC Library in Columbia, Pa has the original Hamilton factory records of all the chronometers they produced. So one can take the serial number of the Hamilton chronometer and plug that into the data base and find out the date it was completed, what the rate was, and some other technical information. One can also see the government contract number it was sold under but those numbers won't tell you what ship the instrument was assigned to. The NAWCC has an excellent bi-monthly magazine and there are a couple of authors who have tracked information such as this through the Naval Observatory records, thus assembling the history of a particular chronometer but it is a painstaking process. I would assume that buried somewhere in the mountains of records that must be associated with the New Jersey some record of the chronometers must exist but it would require a lot of digging. Although capitol (or capital) ships did have a well outfitted watchmaker on board so maybe that's a way to look for such information. The Navy outfitted them with a complete kit from an aluminum watchmaker's bench to the necessary tools and even a watchmaker's lathe. But they did not work on the chronometers, just the clocks and I assume whatever other delicate instruments that needed their skill.
One other point about the Hamiltons. Many dials have the year 1942 marked on them and people often mistake this for the year the chronometer was made. It is, rather, the year the contract was awarded. The serial number will be marked on the back plate and usually on the dial and this is what we use to date the instrument.
It is a fascinating subject and another good if slightly more technical book is Marvin Whitney's The Marine Chronometer. Whitney worked on thousands of chronometers during a long career at the US Naval Observatory and wrote a good book on the subject. I would encourage anyone interested in the subject to check out the NAWCC Museum and Library in Columbia, Pa about two hours west of Philly.
Looking forward to seeing what New Jersey was carrying. In the beginning of the war, with supply lines to Britain and Switzerland cut off, there were several companies that took precision pocket watches and gimballed and boxed them like proper marine chronometers. I don't think these saw use on capital ships.
I’m trying to come visit this Saturday. Hope I can make it.
Great find! Show them off.
I have a 1907 Waltham pocket watch that was my grandfather's. I need to spend the money to get it serviced again because it keeps excellent time. In those days, before fancy computers, smart people with slide rules and elbow grease designed the modern world. They paid attention to detail and they knew what they were doing. Then we decided to hurry up.
I've always been fascinated with clocks, watches, timekeeping etc.
Drachnifel has a great video about chronometers -The Longitude Problem - Improving Navigation with the Harrison Clocks
th-cam.com/video/zlRxWJ_kGEA/w-d-xo.html
I would think that chronometers, being precision instruments, would have serial numbers. The military loves serial numbers and matching them to a ship should be possible.
Good to have equipment in it’s place. Even if not original but might of used on last deployment.
Do the chronometers still work?
Great find...i hope you find the originals. Very interesting, i did not know this. thank you.
What do I think is important for display? A full complement of medical gear and supplies.
I served on USS Shenandoah AD44. All of the Yellowstone class tenders were decommissioned during the Clinton administration and they were mothballed early as far as the expected & usual service life for Navy Vessels. The fact that you have chronometer from USS Yellowstone isn't surprising.
Drach did an excellent video on the first navigational clocks invented John Harrison. These clocks are no doubt descended from his in terms of concept of function, if not in mechanical design.
Marine chronometers didn't become practicably small until Harrison's H4 in the 1760s, but it was prohibitively expensive. The two subsequent copies cost over £400 each at the time. Prices dropped a decade or two later when John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw set up manufactories and sold chronometers of a much simpler design for ~£50. H4 is unquestionably a masterpiece, but its effectiveness is owed to the intense refinement of a flawed design (the verge escapement, which was standard then) and flawless execution. The later chronometers use an altogether simpler plan which required skill to make correctly, but you didn't need to be a legend to make one.
Diamond pallets, enough said.
@@TheSrSunday and no one is really sure how they made them to this day
Marathon makes a great little travel alarm clock that looks a lot like that chronometer. When I was demonstrating my mediocre ability to do celestial navigation in 1988, the Missouri had the old wind-up chronometers in wooden cases, not quartz in plastic. They were wound every morning at the same time and that fact was reported to the OOD, the Navigator, and the Captain. I also wore a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars on the bridge that were made in 1943, probably kept with the ship since it was commissioned.
A friend who recently finished her training as a merchant marine deck officer had to know how to navigate using both "modern" (GPS) and "traditional" (compass, sextant, chronometer) tools, both on electronic and paper charts. The reasoning being that while GPS signals can be messed with the Sun proceeds at a very predictable pace across the sky, and compasses point in the same direction (at least over a few weeks).
As to tracing which ship a particular chronometer went to based on the manufacturers data - highly unlikely as the chronometers would be produced "for the navy", and placed into the care of the navy, and the navy would distribute them as required to ships (hopefully keeping track of the recipient ship).
To answer your question at the end, populate the spaces as if the ship had to sail tomorrow. Obviously time correct artifacts are best but functional replacements as good. Perhaps your contacts of crew who served on the Iowa class may have guidance on what was there when she was in service. My 2c
I think some of the objects that make a ship feel alive are the things that can't necessarily be bolted down- binoculars, handheld charts or clipboards, caps, jackets, stuff like that. I think doing things like leaving wax pencil marks on the CEC boards is the right move.
Those old Hamilton chronometers are so much more beautiful than these. If New Jersey had them hopefully they can be found.
You could have charts in the chart room.
Next could you do a video on the Gonkulator?
That’s pretty cool that it’s made my Marathon. They have a long history of making time pieces for the military and still do. My favorite watch is a Marathon. They make regular house clocks that somewhat look similar to the chronometer. Just a plain black box and white face.
It would be interesting to see a portion of the ship as it would have been during "a day in the life" as it were. Uniforms in lockers, books and playing cards on bunks, stored food stuffs in every nook and cranny.....
As a young'un with an amateur radio operator license in the late 60s, I always thought it was cool to tune in WWV out of Fort Collins CO. They would broadcast the exact time on a cycle of the hour. I wonder if they are still operating.
WWV and WWVH are still in operating.
It's called "The Longitude Problem" and there was a TV series created called Longitude. The UK Royal Society created the challenge to figure out the longitude - latitude was easy with a sextant as mentioned - but not for longitude as the easy way required a reference to GMT and the current local time (which you can get by finding local noon), calculated from the time difference (earth rotates 15 degrees per hour). The problem was accurate time at sea was basically impossible since ships rolled and pitched and that threw off the the pendulums used in the clocks. Harrison, a clock maker, managed to produce a very accurate clock, but because his background wasn't in science, he was denied for many years (decades?) the prize for solving the problem. These days, your cheap quartz clock or watch rivals the old mechanical chronometers. There is still a chronometer certification available for mechanical clocks and watches, and used as a form of prestige, but like I said, a cheap modern digital quartz clock or watch meets those requirements, which is why you find the mechanical ones in people's houses as clocks as chronometers all got replaced with electric quartz ones. And lets not forget GPS, of course,
Now that you've found the chronometers, you'll always be able to find your exact location, and avoid the rocks off Honda Point.
As long as it's not too cloudy, and you can see the sun...
Some examples of the types of charts that would have been used in the different eras that the battleship was in commission.
You use the constellations that you can see at night to determine your latitude. As you get close to the equator from the North: Polaris (the North Star) will be very low on the horizon for example. Whereas, if you're at the North-pole, Polaris will be almost precisely directly overhead because, the reason it is the North Star is because it's located very near the Northern zenith. As you cross the equator, the horizon will completely obscure Polaris. In the southern hemisphere (because there are no stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye or even with primitive telescopes, there is no particular "Southern star") you generally use constellations like the Southern Cross and the megallanic clouds, etc to do the same thing (but, keep in mind, for stars that aren't directly above one of the poles - they migrate throughout the year as the Earth orbits; so stars near the plane of the Earth's equator - a particular constellation will only be visible for the period of the year when the Earth is on that side of the Sun - so you're looking out, at night, towards the section of our little Milky Way which that star is in). So, at night you can use the stars to figure out where you are North and South. Then, during the day, because the earth's axis of rotation isn't precisely aligned with our plane of orbit around the sun - days obviously vary in length depending on the time of year (get longer during the Summer in your particular hemisphere and shorter in Winter). If you're on the Equator - it's easy: day and night are both 12 hours 0 minutes and 0 seconds (not exactly - but close enough for Navy math). So, can use the length of the day to make the same calculation regarding LATITUDE.
But, how do you determine LONGITUDE (where you are East to West)??? That's where the chronometer comes in. You need a very precise clock that keeps good time over long periods of time. Because: if you set you're chronometer to be Noon at the precisely Noon at the point from which you left port (or any KNOWN POSITION) you can keep track of when Noon (or dawn or dusk or whatever) at your new position. If Midnight happens when that chronometer says it should be Noon at the place from which you started - congratulations - you've gone exactly half way around the world. You are now at a longitude exactly 180 degrees from the longitude you started at. If relative noon happens when the chronometer says it's 6p where you started, you've gone 1/4 of the way around the world in the Western direction. If relative noon happens at 6am on the chronometer you've gone 90 degree of longitude to the East.
Another calculation you can do - you can say: hey, at this latitude on this date the day should be 10h 48m 13s. If the day ends up being 10h 49m 17s - you can calculate how far you must have traveled to the West to "lengthen" the day by that amount. Conversely, if the day is shorter than it normally is on that date at that latitude - you know that either (1) you've gone East or (2) the Earth has increased it's rotational velocity. And by measuring that change you can figure out how far you must have traveled or the world has sped up.
Just as a matter of curiosity in which less frequently visited location were the chronometers discovered?
4th deck storage compartment
How about some of the old charts 👍🏻
I still have the chronometer from my great grandfather's last ship, a full rigged downeaster ship, made by Chelse in 1905. Not only does it still run (I'm looking at it as I type here) but it is still in rate -- that is, regardless of the state of winding it goes at a constant rate (sorry; it loses 22 seconds per week, which you have to take into account when you are navigating with it, but it does that year in and year out). No, you can't have it!
Longitude = Like the long sides of a ladder, they run north and south. Latitude = like the rungs of the ladder, they run east to west. Longitude tells you which ladder you are on. Latitude tells you how far up or down you are on that ladder.
How about the standard books used for navigation with the navigation tables?
Accurate time is absolutely critical in using celestial to determine ones location. A one second error leads to a 3 nautical mile error in position
Chronometer - it meters Chronos.
Before or after eating his sons?
@@NorbrookcYes.
@@Norbrookc I believe that was Kronos, not Chronos.
@@michaelsommers2356 More like Κρόνος actually.
@@blshouse Which isn't very helpful for those who don't know the Greek alphabet.
To help me remember which is which, Latitude lines are like the horizontal rungs on a Ladder. And Longitude lines are always the same Long.
Ryan, are you aware of equipment that was taken from an Iowa class to keep the other Iowa's going during the ships' various periods or recommissioning? Thanks for the videos, keep up the great work!
An excellent book was written about the history of keeping time at sea, called "Longitude", by Dava Sobel.
Does the location notation on the first chronometer you showed fit with the deck plan of USS Yellowstone?
It Would be cool to have charts maps amd navigation tools on display on the chart table
Look ul the TV show "Longitude". It is a great historical novel about the invention of the Ship's Chronometer and the difficulty and methodology of determining Longitude.
I suspect that the chronometers used by the USS New Jersey while in active duty might have been removed during the various times it was decommissioned. In some cases those chronometers might have been placed in other ships but in other cases it might have been misplaced during that process.
Also, is that the only location where New Jersey would have had a set of chronometers - especially prior to the Vietnam War?
Is the case for the chronometers some type of temperature- and humidity-controlled environment?
Would it be feasible to get them running?
I am slightly surprised that such precision instruments don't have serial numbers that would allow you to track Where they came from and who they belonged to
They might, but serial numbers don't do much without a reference to call up. That reference may no longer exist or may not be available. You are right, it's just the infrastructure probably isn't there.
@@POVwithRCif there IS a serial number I bet this TH-cam channel can probably get disseminated to the right person that had access to that info. For example the recent bakery video where a viewer submitted the original purchase order for the Hobart mixer.
Is the ship's hull fitted with cathodic protection? Probably been said before but was just curious.
Do ships still carry official ship's chronometers or has GPS completely replaced them (both for directly determining location and as a time source)?
Where is (are) the compass located on this ship? I presume there is a fairly large influence of al the metal around it.
Why three? Same reason as three attitude indicators (artificial horizon) on a jetliner? In case one is out of sync you go with the two that remain in sync?
Please discuss how longitude is determined. Thank you
He reversed latitude and longitude. Even a soldier like me knows that you compare the reading on the chronometer to local noon (determined by sextant) and that gives you the difference from noon GMT (now called UTC) and since 1 hour's difference means 15 degrees, the hours and minutes different from GMT (UTC) give you the number of degrees and minutes you are from Greenwich.
What to show in a museum ship is complicated, obviously. This is even more the case when the activities in a given space would be a complete mystery to the common visitor. The Disbursing Office is a busy and important places for goldbricks and skylarks, if also essential to Ship's Operation. Navigation stations probably "want" typical items on display, but the art & science of navigation is not the sort of thing a paragraph on an 8x10 placard can sufficiently convey. Dunno.
A&E had a good series on shups clocks, longitude, and how it started.
Just a guess but I wonder if the originals were given as keepsakes to senior officers or officials?
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well, considering the raison d'etre for battleships are to put big guns where theyre needed, a full display of shells and cut aways and info on the gun operations would seem vital to me.
It would be great if you had some charts in the chart room. Hopefully veterans or their families can provide some authentic ones. Or ordinary pleasure boat people could donate some old commercial charts just so you have something to show.
read the book by Dava Sobel about longitude. About John Harrison. He invented the marine chronometer
Also the film Longitude, BBC, I believe.
Sobel's book is a good introduction to the subject, but she takes a lot of dramatic license. The TV movie is indeed a fun watch (ba dum tsssss) though the prop department could have applied itself better when it came to the watches (the H4 stand-in was clearly quartz powered). So, enjoy Longitude, but don't stop there :-)
Hi Ryan, I would bet my mother's heart medication that the manufacturers would have info on who/what the clocks where for by their serial numbers.😉
We take it for granted now looking at out GPS navigation systems
Now precise time can be had by receiving broadcasts of WWV (Ft. Collins, CO) on 2.5, 5.0, 10.0, 20.0 MHz. (and WWVH in Hawaii.) Ron W4BIN
How do you insure the time is set correctly after a dead battery or storage, do the units have a time Sync port? Do you need to take them to The Naval Observatory, NIST, or can you hook the to a GPS time Source?
We used to set clocks (not chronometers) with a "time tick" broadcast by shortwave from the naval observatory.
Ryan, you got that 100% backwards. Sextant will get you Latitude--a N/S orientation; you need a chronometer to get Longitude, the E/W orientation
to be fair, he went back and forth.
chronometer is time measuring device= wach (precise version) what not affected from moving in 3D.
So, Ryan, just WHERE did you find them? Evidently, there are still areas you haven’t been or haven’t explored as thoroughly as you could.
In a room with many many other objects that also need final homes.
I'm curious did thy use chronometer at the end of her active time, or did they add GPS? Does anybody know?
NJ Probably did not have GPS at end of here active service. I know a former Quartermaster - navigation expert - served ~1987-1993 - talk about his ship having a commercial GPS- and the captain was very picky on who touched it.
@@wfoj2 I bought a commercial GPS unit in 1988, an expensive model ($300?), as a birthday gift for my BIL. It was not that accurate, although plenty good enough for a large ship, and it took a minutes to find the 3 or 4 satellites needed for best accuracy. The one I got had a specialized function for plotting way-points and courses on the water. I can understand a captain being picky about the unit, perhaps his personal device.
@@wfoj2 My ship had GPS in 1980. It was a large box, two feet on a side.
@@wfoj2 Wow it's hard to imagin, that a battle ship didn't have GPS, but tanks had at the same time. Regarding the commercial GPS, of the captain, I can understand him. I remember my dad telling me and my brother not to touch it, when he bought his first GPS, also in the early 1990s.
I learned what a chronometer was from watching Star Trek haha.
That fluorescent hum... might be worth switching to LED
I dunno, they really help the ambience feel like an old outdated ship which she very much is.
@@cruisinguy6024 🤔 True... but reducing the power bill has alot to recommend it as well. 🤷
Should the Chronometers be spread out across the Ship,if something happens to that one room, you would have issues Navigating., Even In the Modern Era you would want to check the old fashioned way to guard against GPS spoofing.
No. They should be kept in a very safe, armored place very close to where they are needed for precision charting, they should be stored in a container that insulates them from shock-damage (like the felt-lined box they have). They should be very near the center of the ship so they aren't getting jostled as the ship pitches and rolls and, for the love of God, keep them away from any and all magnetic fields. That box is also designed to be a faraday cage. You use very special, precision winding-tools (basically tiny little torque-wrenches) to tension their movements at set intervals and you station sentries to guard them with their lives. If someone messes those things up it throws off your ability to precise chart where the heck you are on the ocean which in turn leads to errors in your ability to calculate your speed (your speed isn't just the revolutions of the screws - it's about the current, the water temp, the wind, etc) so if you can't calculate your position, you can't plot true speed, which means you can't accurately fire your guns which means your battleship can't do what battleships are supposed to do.
To be fair - I'm sure they had more than 3. The 3 stored in that box would have been the 3 that the Chief Navigator trusted most and/or were in the closest agreement. Even by ww2, these devices were so well built that often you could get a whole bunch of them and their time-keeping would be indistinguishable to the human eye, even over months. I also forgot to mention, the box and their casing are designed to withstand all moisture intrusion and were sealed at a near vacuum probably in a helium chamber so any trace amount of gas that wasn't drawn out would be completely inert. And, during combat conditions, I suspect those precious little boxes were, very cautiously, relocated to the charting room within the armored citadel.
@@Joseph55220 You make some good observations here, Joseph but are quite a bit off with the Helium idea. Chronometers have to be wound with a key that fits onto the winding arbor which requires access to the mechanism. There is no way to hermetically seal them, at least not the mechanical ones.