Longitude

Product Information

But though Harrison had patrons interested in seeing him succeed, Harrison also made unlikely enemies.

There are a few more examples of how ships lost their way and wrecked or lost crew to scurvy because they were unable to get their own coordinates. Dava Sobel wrote an interesting narrative about an unlikely hero, John Harrison, who became enmeshed in a David and Goliath battle that lasted decades. The book summarizes the situation and the journey of 18th century clockmaker John Harrison to building timepieces that could keep sufficiently accurate time (despite the jostling, temperature and humidity changes, etc.Eventually his son, William, appealed to King George III, who reportedly muttered under his breath, ''These people have been cruelly treated,'' and said aloud to William, ''By God, Harrison, I will see you righted.

As Sobel details, navigation at sea before the invention of marine chronometers was thwarted by the “longitude problem”.Yes, to anyone interested in history, science, engineering, geography, politics, astronomy, navigation, clockmaking. By 1995, Sobel had witnessed the proliferation of relatively highly accurate quartz time-telling and was beginning to see the spread and use of personal devices with signal-controlled time. It's surprising to realize that it was not until the middle of the 18th century, when Jon Harrison invented the chronometer—"a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world"—that sailors could count on finding their way by reliable devices. Latitude was relatively easy—well, easy enough once you dealt with the pitching deck, the storms, and the scurvy. He was forever battling vested interests until eventually, and after decades, King George III intervened.

The central conflict of Longitude is not the need to calculate longitude but the antagonistic relationship between the Harrisons and the Reverend Maskelyne. Lasting Impression: This book keeps a wonderful balance between the personal, scientific, and political elements of the story. Moreover, it turns out that despite the oceans are vast, it was easy to ambush ships because most followed narrow routes to avoid confusion. The other was comparing your local time, determined through the angle of the sun, to the time at some known location, from which you can calculate the degree of difference between the two places. me, and the which had like to have occasioned me to become rough too; but however we got the ice broke .H. Andrews, and he does an excellent job of bringing color and added insight to an already colorful story. One can easily enough navigate from north to south, or along latitude, with astronomical knowledge and a sextant. The recipe for sales success in international book sales rarely contains such unpromising ingredients as these – an obsessive carpenter’s son from Yorkshire, an intractable navigational problem and a lot of clocks. A stable surface to work from, known coordinates to refer to, a sheltered environment for the unstable chronometers of the day, and the ability to repeat determinations over time made for great accuracy. The focus then shifts to a biography of John Harrison, the 18th century clockmaker who attempted to solve this problem based on timekeeping.