The encyclopedia · R&D & Science · Strategic decision · 1714–1773
Britain's 1714 Longitude Act paid only for a proven navigation method
Parliament offered up to £20,000 for measuring longitude at sea and created a board to judge claims, fund experiments and pay only proven results.
British Parliament · Board of Longitude
the move
In 1714 the British government offered rewards of up to £20,000 — millions in today's money — to anyone who could measure longitude at sea, where ships could find latitude from the sun but had no way to know how far east or west they had sailed.
The Longitude Act nominated twenty-two commissioners to judge proposals, fund experiments that seemed viable, and reward schemes that met the Act's stringent criteria. The Board of Longitude ran the process for decades, financing work on lunar tables and on marine clocks.
John Harrison's H4 chronometer, tested in 1761, lost only five seconds in six weeks — but the Board hesitated, and King George III had to intervene before Harrison finally received the money in 1772. The prize mechanism had worked: the method was proven before it was paid.
why it works
- A reward tied to proven accuracy avoided paying for dead-end promises.
- Small grants let the state sponsor many competing approaches cheaply.
- The board of experts filtered the thousands of crank proposals.
- The scale of the prize (£20,000) attracted serious inventors for generations.
what transfers
For open-ended problems, buy outcomes, not proposals: a panel of experts filters cranks, small grants test ideas, and the big payment is reserved for what actually works.
what came after
The Board's work produced both lunar-distance tables and reliable chronometers, and British navigation became the world's benchmark; the longitude prize became the canonical example of challenge-prize design for research funding.
references
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.