Is it true that prizes were offered for the invention of accurate time keeping methods and food preservation?

Question

When were these prizes offered? Who offered them and why? What did the winner recieve? What were the winning inventions?

Answer 1

This is certainly true for timekeeping, and almost certainly true for food preservation.

The timekeeping story is very well known. See Dava Sobel's book "Longitude" for the story of John Harrison and the chronometer. The prize was offered by the Royal Geographical Society, and the motivation was that mariners had no way to calculate longitude, so they couldn't tell where they were at sea. Accurate timekeeping at sea solves that problem.

Food storage was a perennial problem for mankind, especially in warmer climates. Food does tend to go bad, unless it's frozen. Ice, when available, has always been used to preserve food, but that's not easy to come by.

Spices from the orient -- cloves, nutmeg, pepper -- were also used as food preservatives, since they hide the odors of decomposing food. In the premodern era, the Italian city-states of Venice & Genoa monopolized the lucrative spice trade by their entrepot status. This prompted Portugal, especially, and Spain to seek routes to the Moluccas (Spice Islands). That, in turn, got the Age of Exploration going.

Answer 2

The British government offered prizes for these back about the time of the American Revolution in order to be more accurate in navigation and keep sailors alive on long trips.
The creation of a portable time piece that will be accurate to a few seconds and be totally predicatable in its errors over several months of tossing seas and great temperature changes in determining the longitude. By measuring the position of the sun at its height (noon) and looking at the time in London (on the watch) the difference is how many degree, minutes and seconds and therefore nautical miles one is east or west of London. One nautical mile is one minute at the equator.
The competition turned into torture for the guy who won because the guy in charge of handing over the money was an astronomer who wanted to use a complicated calculation using the moon and resented that a mechanic (not educated elite) came up with something that worked well. He finally got paid after too many years, a huge prize (like millions today).
There are several books that cover or include the story.

Answer 3

John Harrison invented the first accurate chronometer. See this site

http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/john_harrison.htm