Clocktime: Mudge Green Chronometer 1777, 01 History

Thomas Mudge - The Mudge Green marine chronometer with constant force escapement.
Join Dr John C Taylor OBE from the Clocktime digital museum as he discusses the history of the Mudge Green Chronometer, dated 1777.
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Thomas Mudge was born in Exeter in 1715 and he was apprenticed in London to George Graham, who of course had taken over by tradition from the business of Thomas Tompion, with his definition of quality. And so Mudge was imbibed with quality early into his apprenticeship. When George Graham died, Mudge took over the business in 1751 and in 1759, Mudge was commissioned by the King to make a watch for his wife Queen Charlotte. And into this new watch he incorporated two new inventions: temperature compensation of the balance wheel and most importantly a lever escapement. And in 1765, he was on the Board of Longitude committee that was formed to test the principles of John Harrison's chronometer H4. And this reignited his interest into a marine, making a marine chronometer for himself. And in 1771, he handed over his London Business to his partner, Dutton, and went to Exeter to look after his elder brother, who was unfortunately ill and more importantly to concentrate on making his first marine chronometer. He designed his first marine chronometer as an 8 day mechanism but the spring, the winding spring gave problems and it had to be limited only to two days before it could be tested for its accuracy in Greenwich in the Royal Observatory there. The Board of Longitude continually changed the goal posts and now required two identical chronometers for test for the Longitude Prize. Mudge took over seven years to construct his two new identical constant force mechanisms and he differentiated them by the colour of the ray skin on each of the cases; green or blue. And it took something like seven years for Mudge to make these two. In the meanwhile, in 1776, he'd been appointed the Royal Watchmaker. Mudge was awarded £500 from the Board of Longitude in 1777. Mudge was horrified and appealed to the government with a detailed pamphlet on the bias of the Astronomer Royal Maskelyne and a report of the House of Commons subcommittee on the matter awarded Mudge £3,000. Relations between the Board of Longitude and John Harrison had been bad enough but the relations with Mudge were even worse, fought out in public with claim and counter claim in these various pamphlets. Mudge died in 1794 but both the chronometers blue and green have disappeared completely from the records. When Commander Gould looked into it and he was the expert who had found and restored all the Harrison sea clocks, he thought that Mudge Green had been lost at sea in a shipwreck. Well, this is Mudge Green.