Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in the clocks of John Harrison, not just among ‘clockies’ but also model engineers, following on from publication of Dava Sobel’s book Longitude and the wonderful TV series in 2000 with Michael Gambon as Harrison and Jeremy Irons as Gould. We have since seen a few attempts at recreating Harrison’s creations, and rather more clocks of a Harrison type but suitable for a domestic environment. Notable among them were two clocks by the late Stuart Pratt, who also started to make an H4 watch, which was successfully completed after his death. It was the H4 which solved the Longitude at sea problem for which Harrison was eventually rewarded.

This brass skeleton clock inspired by Harrison’s early sea clocks was shown at the 2016 Guildford Rally by Chris Boydell.