Longitude

Product Information

But it’s good to know that if the GPS network ever goes down, there is at least one museum I can rob for some high-quality longitude calculation devices. It portrays the intrigue, rivalries, conflicts, and accidental discoveries that make this book a fascinating reading experience. It started life as an article in the Harvard Magazine about the 1993 Longitude Symposium in Cambridge Mass. And since the board was mostly made up of astronomers, they instinctively preferred an astronomical solution to a simply mechanical one.

To win the full prize, the method or device had to be accurate to within one-half degree on a trip from England to the West Indies. In the tercentenary year of the Longitude Act, Fourth Estate present an anniversary edition of Dana Sobel’s bestselling history of an epic scientific quest and the unlikely triumph of an English genius. But keeping track of the time simply was not possible with contemporary clocks which gained or lost whole minutes in an hour on land. There are biographical articles on all the major characters added; boxed information on the important scientific, nautical, historical and artistic background to the extraordinary story, time lines, and diagrams to explain the geography, horology and astrology of the Longitude problem. The central conflict of Longitude is not the need to calculate longitude but the antagonistic relationship between the Harrisons and the Reverend Maskelyne.Enter John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker whose determination and ingenuity led him to create a series of groundbreaking timepieces, known as chronometers. He found Harrison’s time-based solution to be an affront to the purity of astronomy and took personal issue with Harrison’s endeavors.

The Board of Longitude consisted of government officials, naval officers, and scientists from both astronomy and mathematics.I first read Longitude, by Dava Sobel, just after I finished high school, and I devoured it in a sitting or two.