Chronicles of a Barns UK Holiday: Greenwich

Spent the day at Greenwich today. Visited a couple of museums, starting with The National Maritime Museum. I particularly enjoyed the figurehead collection and the exhibition room about trade routes and the East India Company.

We headed out to the Queen's House. This land this home was built on was given to Queen Anne by King James by way of apology for speaking harshly to her in public. She had just shot his dog - apparently by accident - but her wall-sized painting made her seem to be the kind of gal who doesn't take kindly to being spoken down to publicly. So I imagine after a bit of sulking and giving James the cold shoulder, he bought her out of her mood with land.
Some great portraits in the house by the way.

It was then a very short stroll to the Greenwich Observatory. This was great fun and really interesting.

We finished the day with a walk through Greenwich Markets.

Bennie on a perch - and those are new pants!

All lies! It was at least 3 blocks west of the Prime Meridian.

Interesting note: the Prime Meridian changed depending who the Astronomer Royal was. The building behind housed the main observatories. As the equipment got larger, new extensions were built, and the Meridian used shifted. The Prime Meridian here became the default for the world in the 1880s because the Astronomer Royal at the time (Airy) had been in the position for 50 years at that time, so the UK had had a long duration of using the same default longitude.

Another interesting note: The Ordinance Survey, the national mapping agency for the UK, still uses an older Prime Meridian about 10 metres to the west of here, as all the maps and land titles were initially defined in the 1750s. GPS uses a Prime Meridian about 100m east of here because "the earth is lumpy" or something like that.

Power boat from the 1930's, which held the water speed record (about 165 km/hr) for a time.

Figurehead for the HMS Benedict.

Rescue boats, with solid cork bow and stern filling. The boats were self-righting if they flipped in rough seas.

Gridlock on the Thames in the Age of Sail.

One exhibition hall looked at the British East India Company, and their interactions with China and India.

What happens if you tell a company, "You can't have a monopoly on trade with China, or a monopoly on trade with India, but you _can_ have a monopoly on any taxes you raise from territories you control." Not long after this, the attempt to make government a profit-making venture led to the Indian Rebellion and, ultimately, the British Government shutting the Company down.

Chinese court case against 4 British sailors accused of killing a Chinese during a riot. On the left are 4 leading British traders, on the right, 4 leading Chinese traders. 1 found guilty and hanged, 3 found innocent.

The teeny, tiny Admiral's uniform that Nelson died in. I swear Ben would have fit snugly in it.

_That_ painting, that most Australians would be familiar with. Up close, Cook's face and hands were very detailed, but the uniform was quite abstract. You can't really see it at a distance.

The first attempt at painting a kangaroo, based on verbal descriptions, notes, and a pelt. It looks like a rodent.

The discount Prime Meridian, marked on a pavement about 500m north of the Royal Observatory. Don't have to pay to get in!

The Royal Observatory, up on top of a hill looking over London.

People standing in a line to stand on a line.

Ben being coached in how to use a spectrometer.

Part of a display on the development of more accurate timepieces, thus allowing determination of longitude at sea. The man who solved the problem, John Harrison, developed a portable clock accurate to 1/3rd of a second each day, enough to win the prize (and to determine longitude to within 2km on a trans-Atlantic voyage - good enough). Later, I believed he would be able to build a timepiece accurate to 1/100th of a second each day (ie. it would lose 3 seconds each year), but died before building a prototype. His notes were later discovered, and in the 1970's this Burgess Clock was made to Harrison's specifications, and it was as accurate as had been predicted.