The establishment of the Board of Longitude was motivated by this problem and by the 1707 grounding of four ships of Vice-Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet off the Isles of Scilly, resulting in heavy loss of life.
[3] Under this heading, the Board made many lesser awards, including some awards in total £5,000 made to John Harrison before he received his main prize, an award of £3,000 to the widow of Tobias Mayer, whose lunar tables were the basis of the lunar data in the early decades of The Nautical Almanac, £300 to Leonhard Euler for his (assumed) contribution to the work of Mayer, £50 each to Richard Dunthorne and Israel Lyons for contributing methods to shorten the calculations connected with lunar distances, and awards made to the designers of improvements in chronometers.
The Board recognised that any serious attempt would be based on the recognition that the earth rotates through 15° of longitude every hour.
However, with the expectation that accurate clocks would eventually become commonplace, John Harrison showed that his method was the way of the future.
With the significant problems considered as solved, the Board of Longitude was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1828 and replaced by a Resident Committee for Scientific Advice for the Admiralty consisting of three scientific advisors: Thomas Young, Michael Faraday and Edward Sabine.