Rupert Thomas Gould
Royal Navy Officer, Horologist and Author · 1890–1948
Who is Rupert Thomas Gould?
Rupert Thomas Gould was a British Royal Navy officer, horologist, author and broadcaster, born on 16 November 1890 and educated at the Royal Naval College. He is best remembered for his painstaking restoration, beginning in 1920, of the historic marine chronometers built by clockmaker John Harrison, whose H1 through H4 timekeepers had fallen into disrepair at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Gould's twelve years of meticulous restoration work was later chronicled in Dava Sobel's book Longitude and its television adaptation, in which he was portrayed by actor Jeremy Irons. In 1923 he published The Marine Chronometer, long considered the standard scholarly work on the subject. Beyond horology, Gould had a lifelong fascination with unexplained and little-known facts, publishing a series of popular books including Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts in 1928 and Enigmas in 1929, in which he catalogued curiosities such as sea-serpent sightings, the Loch Ness Monster, and remote, little-visited places, devoting a chapter of Oddities to Bouvet Island as an illustration of the world's most extreme isolation. He also became a popular BBC radio broadcaster on general knowledge before his death on 5 October 1948.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Rupert Gould" · Jonathan Betts, Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (Oxford University Press, 2006) · Rupert Gould, Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Geoffrey Bles, 1928)