But it wasn’t good enough for Harrison. The same vicelike conviction that led him to his finest innovations—along his own lines of thinking, without regard for the opinions of others—rendered him deaf to praise. What did it matter what the Royal Society thought of H-2, if its mechanism did not pass muster with him? Harrison, now a London resident and forty-eight years old, faded into his workshop and was hardly heard from during the nearly twenty years he devoted to the completion of H-3, which he called his “curious third machine.” He emerged only to request and collect from the board
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