Longitude

Product Information

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is a 1995 best-selling book by Dava Sobel about John Harrison, an 18th-century clockmaker who created the first clock ( chronometer) sufficiently accurate to be used to determine longitude at sea—an important development in navigation. It started life as an article in the Harvard Magazine about the 1993 Longitude Symposium in Cambridge Mass. But finding one's longitude, the lines that connected the north and south poles, was much more difficult. Maritime navigation is a technical issue, but this tale reeked of jealousy, competitiveness, and political intrigue. If you consider yourself a history buff, sailor, or horology head and you haven’t read Longitude, you owe it to yourself to get a copy.

Normal changes of temperature encountered en route from a cold country of origin to a tropical trade zone thinned or thickened a clock's lubricating oil and made its metal parts expand or contract with equally disastrous results. In "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time," I was taken on an exhilarating journey through the fascinating world of 18th-century navigation and the brilliant mind of John Harrison. It is a story of the triumph of a perfectionistic genius of humble origins over the well-educated experts of the day. Without Harrison and his chronometers, Great Britain would not have had the success it did in establishing and maintaining its empire, making one British astronomer’s personal vendetta against Harrison and his chronometers all the more damning. Harrison spent four decades perfecting a watch that would earn him compensation from Parliament and longitude rewards thanks to the recognition and influence of King George III of Great Britain.

Consequently it did not deal much with the details either of the astronomical or mechanical approaches to solving the problem of finding longitude on the high seas. I devoured this in a few days and since I am only able to devote about an hour a day at bedtime to eye-reading these days, that's quite an accomplishment. This one is all about the late 18th century watch maker, John Harrison, who builds a series of highly accurate watches in an attempt to win a prize for a device to be able to establish longitude at sea.

For the longest time, the solution to calculating longitude eluded mariners because no one could construct a clock that was both accurate enough and durable enough.A quote that emphasizes that despite Harrison's lack of formal education in mathematics and arithmetic, he possessed an extraordinary talent for using simple tools like sticks, pendulums, and loops of gut to calculate and measure time accurately.

It was Ptolemy in ‘ Geographia’, written in the 2nd century, who contributed the concept of a co-ordinate system based on the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude, for accurately plotting any spot on the surface of earth. In her four decades as a science journalist she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and co-authored five books, including Is Anyone Out There?

Did John Harrison actually win the prize, or did jealous prigs and political big-wigs cheat him of his due reward? Finally in 1884, representatives from 26 countries agreed at the International Meridian Conference to make the Greenwich meridian the world's prime meridian. Longitude captures the spirit of the great age of exploration, and the taming of the leviathans in the blue spaces on the maps, in the best possible way. In 1998, The Illustrated Longitude was published, supplementing the earlier text with 180 images of characters, events, instruments, maps and publications. Anyone could determine that he was on the tropic of cancer, but determining how far along the tropic of cancer was a different challenge--one that, if solved, would revolutionize navigation and save countless lives.