Our Place in the History of Technological Innovation
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the inability to measure precise position at sea was the greatest scientific and commercial challenge of the time, hampering exploration and commerce.
While the scientific establishment searched for an answer to the longitude problem in the stars or lunar cycles, a lone craftsman named John Harrison concluded that the solution lay in precise synchronized timekeeping.
In 1761, after 20 years of effort and three increasingly more reliable prototypes, Harrison produced the world’s most accurate timepiece to date. Using his chronometer, navigators opened the seas to global exchange of materials, goods, people, and ideas at an unprecedented rate.
The name of this revolutionary breakthrough was Harrison’s Fourth Marine Chronometer, also known as H4.
Fast Forward
Today, exploration, discovery, and commercial productivity are hampered by another significant challenge: navigating a growing sea of documents, memos, e-mails, and other types of text-based information. Traditional keyword searching and statistical pattern-matching techniques have provided only partial solutions.
Meanwhile, a company in San Francisco has taken an entirely novel approach to organizing and navigating through vast amounts of disparate information. Now it is helping businesses steer away from hazards and discover new value in precisely navigable data.
The company’s name, appropriately, is H5.
