The general population didn’t need it, but there was considerable interest in having a form of standardized time as far back as 1530. https://en.wikipedia.org/

The general population didn’t need it, but there was considerable interest in having a form of standardized time as far back as 1530. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Transport_of_chronometers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Transport...: “The first to suggest traveling with a clock to determine longitude, in 1530, was Gemma Frisius, a physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker from the Netherlands. The clock would be set to the local time of a starting point whose longitude was known, and the longitude of any other place could be determined by comparing its local time with the clock time.”