Longitude: Season 1 Episode 1

Part 1

When the British Parliament creates an award of £20,000 to whoever can come up with a solution for determining longitude at sea, a carpenter-turned-clockmaker, John Harrison, begins his experiments to build an accurate timepiece unaffected by sea travel. His main obstacles are lack of money, a judgment Board convinced that the answer lies in astronomy and not clocks, and the mechanics of the clock itself.