Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (PDF)

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The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man’s forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day–“the longitude problem.”Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that “the longitude problem” was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison’s forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This is a gem of a book.” ―Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times“A simple tale, brilliantly told.” ―Washington Post Book World“As much a tale of intrigue as it is of science…A book full of gems for anyone interested in history, geography, astronomy, navigation, clockmaking, and–not the least–plain old human ambition and greed.” ―Philadelphia Inquirer“Only someone with Dava Sobel’s unusual background in both astronomy and psychology could have written it. Longitude is a wonderful story, wonderfully told.” ―Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses“The marine chronometer is a glorious and fascinating object, but it is not a simple one, and its explanation calls for a writer as skilled with words as the watchmakers were with their tools; happily such a writer has been found in Dava Sobel.” ―Patrick O’Brian, author of The Commodore and the Aubrey/Maturin series About the Author Dava Sobel (born June 15, 1947) is the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, and A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. A former staff science reporter for The New York Times, she has also written for numerous magazines, including Discover, Harvard Magazine, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker.Her most unforgettable assignment at the Times required her to live 25 days as a research subject in the chronophysiology lab at Montefiore Hospital, where the boarded-up windows and specially trained technicians kept her from knowing whether it was day outside or night.Her work has won recognition from the National Science Board, which gave her its 2001 Individual Public Service Award “for fostering awareness of science and technology among broad segments of the general public.” She also received the 2004 Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in England and the 2008 Klumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for “increasing the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.”A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, she has taught several seminars in science writing at the university level, and held a two-year residency at Smith College in fall 2013. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. LongitudeThe True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His TimeBy Dava SobelWalker & CompanyCopyright © 2007 Dava SobelAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780802715296CHAPTER ONE Imaginary Lines When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. –MARK TWAIN, Life on the Mississippi : : Once on a Wednesday excursion when Iwas a little girl, my father bought me abeaded wire ball that I loved. At atouch, I could collapse the toy into a flatcoil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollowsphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth,because its hinged wires traced the same pattern ofintersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in myschoolroom–the thin black lines of latitude and longitude.The few colored beads slid along the wirepaths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.My father strode up Fifth Avenue to RockefellerCenter with me on his shoulders, and we stopped tostare at the statue of Atlas, carrying Heaven and Earthon his.The bronze orb that Atlas held aloft, like the wiretoy in my hands, was a see-through world, defined byimaginary lines. The Equator. The Ecliptic. The Tropicof Cancer. The Tropic of Capricorn. The Arctic Circle.The prime meridian. Even then I could recognize,in the graph-paper grid imposed on the globe, a powerfulsymbol of all the real lands and waters on theplanet.Today, the latitude and longitude lines governwith more authority than I could have imagined forty-oddyears ago, for they stay fixed as the world changesits configuration underneath them–with continentsadrift across a widening sea, and national boundariesrepeatedly redrawn by war or peace.As a child, I learned the trick for remembering thedifference between latitude and longitude. The latitudelines, the parallels, really do stay parallel to eachother as they girdle the globe from the Equator to thepoles in a series of shrinking concentric rings. The meridiansof longitude go the other way: They loop fromthe North Pole to the South and back again in greatcircles of the same size, so they all converge at theends of the Earth.Lines of latitude and longitude began crisscrossingour worldview in ancient times, at least three centuriesbefore the birth of Christ. By A.D. 150, the cartographerand astronomer Ptolemy had plotted them onthe twenty-seven maps of his first world atlas. Alsofor this landmark volume, Ptolemy listed all the placenames in an index, in alphabetical order, with the latitudeand longitude of each–as well as he could gaugethem from travelers’ reports. Ptolemy himself hadonly an armchair appreciation of the wider world. Acommon misconception of his day held that anyoneliving below the Equator would melt into deformityfrom the horrible heat.The Equator marked the zero-degree parallel oflatitude for Ptolemy. He did not choose it arbitrarilybut took it on higher authority from his predecessors,who had derived it from nature while observing themotions of the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, andplanets pass almost directly overhead at the Equator.Likewise the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn,two other famous parallels’ assume their positionsat the sun’s command. They mark the northernand southern boundaries of the sun’s apparent motionover the course of the year.Ptolemy was free, however, to lay his prime meridian,the zero-degree longitude line, wherever heliked. He chose to run it through the Fortunate Islands(now called the Canary & Madeira Islands) off thenorthwest coast of Africa. Later mapmakers movedthe prime meridian to the Azores and to the CapeVerde Islands, as well as to Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem,St. Petersburg, Pisa, Paris, and Philadelphia,among other places, before it settled down at last inLondon. As the world turns, any line drawn from poleto pole may serve as well as any other for a startingline of reference. The placement of the prime meridianis a purely political decision.Here lies the real, hard-core difference betweenlatitude and longitude–beyond the superficial differencein line direction that any child can see: The zero-degreeparallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature,while the zero-degree meridian of longitudeshifts like the sands of time. This difference makesfinding latitude child’s play, and turns the determinationof longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma-onethat stumped the wisest minds of theworld for the better part of human history.Any sailor worth his salt can gauge his latitude wellenough by the length of the day, or by the height ofthe sun or known guide stars above the horizon. ChristopherColumbus followed a straight path across theAtlantic when he “sailed the parallel” on his 1492journey, and the technique would doubtless have carriedhim to the Indies had not the Americas intervened.The measurement of longitude meridians, in comparison,is tempered by time. To learn one’s longitudeat sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard shipand also the time at the home port or another placeof known longitude–at that very same moment. Thetwo clock times enable the navigator to convert thehour difference into a geographical separation. Sincethe Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete onefull revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, onehour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees.And so each hour’s time difference between theship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteendegrees of longitude to the east or west. Every day atsea, when the navigator resets his ship’s clock to localnoon when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky,and then consults the home-port clock, every hour’sdiscrepancy between them translates into another fifteendegrees of longitude.Those same fifteen degrees of longitude also correspondto a distance traveled. At the Equator, wherethe girth of the Earth is greatest, fifteen degreesstretch fully one thousand miles. North or south ofthat line, however, the mileage value of each degreedecreases. One degree of longitude equals four minutesof time the world over, but in terms of distance,one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equatorto virtually nothing at the poles.Precise knowledge of the hour in two differentplaces at once–a longitude prerequisite so easily accessibletoday from any pair of cheap wristwatches–wasutterly unattainable up to and including the eraof pendulum clocks. On the deck of a rolling ship,such clocks would slow down, or speed up, or stoprunning altogether. Normal changes in temperatureencountered en route from a cold country of origin toa tropical trade zone thinned or thickened a clock’slubricating oil and made its metal parts expand or contractwith equally disastrous results. A rise or fall inbarometric pressure, or the subtle variations in theEarth’s gravity from one latitude to another, couldalso cause a clock to gain or lose time.For lack of a practical method of determining longitude,every great captain in the Age of Explorationbecame lost at sea despite the best available chartsand compasses. From Vasco da Gama to Vasco Nunezde Balboa, from Ferdinand Magellan to Sir FrancisDrake–they all got where they were going willy-nilly,by forces attributed to good luck or the grace of God.As more and more sailing vessels set out to conqueror explore new territories, to wage war, or toferry gold and commodities between foreign lands,the wealth of nations floated upon the oceans. Andstill no ship owned a reliable means for establishingher whereabouts. In consequence, untold numbers ofsailors died when their destinations suddenly loomedout of the sea and took them by surprise. In a singlesuch accident, on October 22, 1707, at the Scilly Islesnear the southwestern tip of England, four homeboundBritish warships ran aground and nearly twothousand men lost their lives.The active quest for a solution to the problem oflongitude persisted over four centuries and across thewhole continent of Europe. Most crowned heads ofstate eventually played a part in the longitude story,notably King George III of England and King LouisXIV of France. Seafaring men such as Captain WilliamBligh of the Bounty and the great circumnavigatorCaptain James Cook, who made three long voyagesof exploration and experimentation before his violentdeath in Hawaii, took the more promising methods tosea to test their accuracy and practicability.Renowned astronomers approached the longitudechallenge by appealing to the clockwork universe:Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, ChristiaanHuygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley,of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars forhelp. Palatial observatories were founded at Paris,London, and Berlin for the express purpose of determininglongitude by the heavens. Meanwhile, lesserminds devised schemes that depended on the yelpsof wounded dogs, or the cannon blasts of signalships strategically anchored–somehow–on the openocean.In the course of their struggle to find longitude,scientists struck upon other discoveries that changedtheir view of the universe. These include the first accuratedeterminations of the weight of the Earth, thedistance to the stars, and the speed of light.As time passed and no method proved successful,the search for a solution to the longitude problem assumedlegendary proportions, on a par with discoveringthe Fountain of Youth, the secret of perpetualmotion, or the formula for transforming lead intogold. The governments of the great maritime nations–includingSpain, the Netherlands, and certaincity-states of Italy–periodically roiled the fervor byoffering jackpot purses for a workable method. TheBritish Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prizeequal to a king’s ransom (several million dollars in today’scurrency) for a “Practicable and Useful” meansof determining longitude.English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanicalgenius who pioneered the science of portable precisiontimekeeping, devoted his life to this quest. Heaccomplished what Newton had feared was impossible:He invented a clock that would carry the truetime from the home port, like an eternal flame, to anyremote corner of the world.Harrison, a man of simple birth and high intelligence,crossed swords with the leading lights of hisday. He made a special enemy of the Reverend NevilMaskelyne, the fifth astronomer royal, who contestedhis claim to the coveted prize money, and whose tacticsat certain junctures can only be described as foulplay.With no formal education or apprenticeship to anywatchmaker, Harrison nevertheless constructed a seriesof virtually friction-free clocks that required nolubrication and no cleaning, that were made from materialsimpervious to rust, and that kept their movingparts perfectly balanced in relation to one another, regardlessof how the world pitched or tossed aboutthem. He did away with the pendulum, and he combineddifferent metals inside his works in such a waythat when one component expanded or contractedwith changes in temperature, the other counteractedthe change and kept the clock’s rate constant.His every success, however, was parried by membersof the scientific elite, who distrusted Harrison’smagic box. The commissioners charged with awardingthe longitude prize–Nevil Maskelyne among them–changedthe contest rules whenever they saw fit, so asto favor the chances of astronomers over the likes ofHarrison and his fellow “mechanics.” But the utilityand accuracy of Harrison’s approach triumphed in theend. His followers shepherded Harrison’s intricate,exquisite invention through the design modificationsthat enabled it to be mass produced and enjoy wideuse.An aged, exhausted Harrison, taken under thewing of King George III, ultimately claimed his rightfulmonetary reward in 1773-after forty strugglingyears of political intrigue, international warfare, academicbackbiting, scientific revolution, and economicupheaval.All these threads, and more, entwine in the linesof longitude. To unravel them now–to retrace theirstory in an age when a network of geostationary satellitescan nail down a ship’s position within a few feetin just a moment or two–is to see the globe anew.Continues…Excerpted from Longitudeby Dava Sobel Copyright © 2007 by Dava Sobel. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a great read. The book is highly entertaining as well as being very informative. Dava Sobel makes a complex subject, the measurement of longitude, come alive. The story is not only that of a scientific and technical quest, but also of human conflict, told with great skill. It begins with the concept of longitude, why knowing ones longitude was critical and how it was treated prior to the seventeenth century. The key to longitude was time, or rather knowing the time of an event, at your location and at a reference location. The two primary methods to do this are via the use of a very accurate timepiece or through the use of a knowledge of the position of the moon relative to the sun and stars, both of which I discuss this in a bit more detail at the end of this review.The problem of an accurate longitude measurement was so critical that the British Government created a £20,000 prize for the solution to this problem. Most of this discussion is about John Harrison, a carpenter and self taught clockmaker, who developed a timepiece that was accurate enough to be used to measure longitude, and the British Royal Astronomers, primarily Nevil Maskelyne, who favored the method based on the position of the moon. The book discusses Harrison’s creation of marine timepieces (chronometers) that were accurate enough to solve this problem and win him the prize, and the astronomers, primarily Maskelyne, who favored the moon position method and thus sought to discredit the clock approach and deny Harrison the prize.My only reservation about the book is that there is very little technical information about exactly how Harrison’s chronometers operated. There is one figure showing an escapement mechanism and a very brief discussion of how he solved lubrication and temperature problems, but I did not feel that this was sufficient to really understand how his clocks worked. Thus, I feel that a serious student of clocks would likely to be disappointed in the technical aspects of the book. However, a more general reader like myself could overlook this deficiency and focus of the human aspects of the book. I was able to find enough technical information about the operation of watches from the Internet to satisfy my needs, so the lack of this level of detail did not cause me to downrate the book from 5-stars.THE MEASUREMENT OF LONGITUDE -The simplest event to use to determine longitude is high noon, the time when you sun reached its highest point in the sky. If you had a watch set to 12noon at a reference location you could know your longitude based on the time, on this watch, that you locally observed high noon. For instance, if this watch was set so that it registered noon at Greenwich England (the location of the Royal Observatory), and you saw the sun reach it highest point at 1 o’clock, then you knew that you were one hour west of Greenwich. Since a day (one complete earth rotation) is divided into 24 hours and a circle is divided into 360 degrees, each hour of difference corresponds to 360/24 or 15 degrees of longitude, or about 1000 miles at the equator. Unfortunately, in the early 18th century there was no clock that could operate on a ship that was accurate enough to yield time measurements that could be used to accurately perform this task. If the clock ran to fast or too slow, say by only one minute per day, then in 10 days it would be off by 10 minutes or 1/6 of an hour or 2.5 degrees of longitude. At the equator this corresponds to about 1000/6 or 166.7 miles, which was clearly unacceptable. Even a much more accurate clock, say one that was off by only 10 seconds per day, would be unacceptable for a long voyage. Such a clock would be off by 300 seconds in 30 days or 5 minutes, yielding an error of 1.25 degrees, or about 83 miles at the equator. In practice, two chronometers are used, one set to the reference time and one continually adjusted to 12 O’clock at local high noon. Since the local clock was continually being adjusted it did not have to be as accurate as the reference clock that was not adjusted. Using a locally adjusted clock allowed one to determine the longitude at any time of day, instead of just at high noon.Another approach was to chart the position of the moon relative to specific stars, or the sun. One could then determine the longitude by using an almanac showing the time at Greenwich when the moon was in a particular position and when it occurred locally. The local time was determined by observing high noon. This method also had limitations as it required many laborious calculations, which were subject to error, and it could not be used when the moon could not be observed. A still earlier method used the eclipse of the moons of Jupiter as the reference, but this required a very accurate telescopic measurement that was very difficult to do on a swaying ship.

⭐This title is

⭐beautiful introductory analogy of what this entire book is about, the true story of longitude, “a fascinating tale of a remarkable achievement in timekeeping and navigation.”Latitude, that is, the determination of north-south position, had been simple and reliable for centuries, but a simple and reliable method for finding east-west (longitude) had been difficult, well into the 1700s. The longitude problem persisted, and as empire’s growth and security demanded increasingly efficient maritime navigation, the British Crown in 1714 offered a £20,000 prize to the man who could find a method for reliably and reproducibly determining it. An elaborate and complicated system involving lunar observation came about, but was laborious and calculation-intensive. Then came John Harrison, the dedicated genius who devised the first seagoing chronometers (this is origin of the word). He solved the problem, but personal rivalries, scientific steadfastness (more correctly pigheadedness), and the vagaries and idiocy of bureaucracy kept him from his rightful prize and recognition for far too long.This is the story that Sobel tells. It reads very easily, so for any who might be intimidated or fear this book is a nonstop chronicle of lofty scientific jargon and notation, don’t be. The story flows well, and Sobel explains those subjects that require it, so no reader will be left behind. As written, this book struck me as being very much like the outstanding old British

⭐TV show, shedding light on a specific and apparently finite historical issue, but then showing the myriad fascinating, radiating spokes of the famous and infamous. Isaac Newton touches on this story, as does Darwin, Captain Cook, King George III, Mason and Dixon (of the very famous Line), and even the notorious Captain Bligh.But what exactly is the relevance of telling this story of a fundamental navigational problem that was solved over 200 years ago? In the era of GPS telling us how to drive the SUV three miles to the grocery store, how does this story continue to carry meaning? I wondered this going in, as I picked up this book on the hearty recommendations of colleagues. The answer comes immediately (and I won’t spoil it), before Sobel even begins, with Neil Armstrong’s surprisingly good introduction.It’s hard to picture a man who would take years to build a single clock. The cable channels give us how-it’s-made shows showing automated factories cranking out identical products to the tune of 100,000 per day, and it took Harrison five years to craft his first sea clock, just one device. The others, even with his growing experience and expertise, took even longer. This is testament to a man of patience, and a meticulous one at that (one of Sobel’s asides is Harrison’s writing style, with and an introductory sentence that runs on for 25 pages). Harrison’s story also is testament to a world with no electricity, no instant communications, no television or Internet, where literacy remained the domain of the upper classes, and where there was precious little to do with non-work day unless you had a consuming passion. Sobel tells of selfless celestial observers dedicating decades of their lives to chronicling the positions of the sun, moon, and stars; their tedious devotion empowered the Western Hemisphere for rapid colonization, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution, mass communication, and ironically the global marketplace.I found myself about halfway through the book taking note of what is NOT present in Sobel’s book. This book is missing the overdone details and asides, the too common and too-long side- and backstories that many books of this type tend toward, where the main narrative loses its way or is buried in its related stories, as interesting as they may be. This is a good thing. This tale is not just the story of John Harrison, nor is it his biography. It is the story of the longitude problem, and it encompasses many disparate people and issues, but Sobel keeps it on-task, simple, straightforward and easy to follow. If you are looking for over-detailed obsession on every aspect of the story and copious academic notation, this is not the book for you. Sobel does, however, provide an extensive source listing and an index, making this book the perfect starting point for further detailed reading or research on the subject.Bottom line: I’ve been to London, but there are a number of sights there I have yet to see. This story and Sobel’s eloquent, fanciful, even loving descriptions of Harrison’s timepieces themselves (complete with color plates showing them) has added the Greenwich Observatory to my bucket list. Sobel’s simple and compelling tale of how “time is longitude and longitude time” makes me want to straddle the prime meridian, with feet in both hemispheres, and see the timepieces that changed modern seafaring, literally making possible the world we know today.

⭐I expected the story to be interesting, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Dava’s prose.

⭐Well I certainly learned a bunch from this book. Chronometer was an if seen term in my reading of various sea voyages and exploration over the years. But I certainly did not know as much as I thought I did. This book was a real eye opener and not at all boring. Easy to read and understand , I would recommend it.

⭐If you are expecting 200 pages of mechanical drawings and equations, or even a detailed explanation of how Harrison’s clock worked, you’re out of luck. Likewise, if you’re expecting a a blow-by-blow account of his inventions and dealings with the Board of Longitude, you are also going to be disappointed.However, if you are looking for an interesting, fast read about the problems of calculating the longitude of a point on earth and how these were eventually solved, you have come to the right place.This is popular science-history – a tale of people and personalities as well as inventions and discoveries. Sobel’s writing is accessible and her verve carries the reader along in the same way as reading a good novel. In just over 200 pages, there isn’t much in the way of detail – but the reader does come away with a broad-brush overview of what the problem was, the reasons why it was so intractable, the various methods for solving it, and why the problem was solved in the way it was.

⭐First published in 1995, this popular science/history book by Dava Sobel has been read by many of us over the proceeding years. Nowadays of course so many of us use GPS in our phones, satnavs and other devices that we tend to not think about the past when such things were not possible. Here then we read of the problems of navigating the seas in the past, and the problems that occurred.Although latitude had already been worked out, when it came to longitude, so the matter was far from simple, after all any simple navigation requires the navigator to be able to see things such as the sun, the moon and the stars. Bad weather can blanket the sky meaning that things cannot be made out, and then also something like the moon is not always visible, as it orbits us and obviously enters the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. To be able then to more accurately determine where you are it obviously becomes apparent that you need an accurate timekeeper.This is a pop book so is relatively short and keeps to the main areas of interest, and so we read of the remarkable story of John Harrison, originally a carpenter, who made the major breakthrough in keeping accurate time at sea. But this also takes in more than that, as we see that longitude on land led to more accurate maps, that with trying to find an answer with the stars so eventually the speed of light was determined, and the fact that the Earth is slowing down, along with other discoveries. For the main part of this though, it is about Harrison and his ever-increasing work at adapting and trying to create smaller timepieces than his first version.As we see, in this country so a board was set up and rewards offered for a person who could come up with an accurate way to determine longitude at sea, and how the rules always seemed to be changing, at least when it came to Harrison and his inventions. With greed and one-upmanship so there was some skulduggery that went on behind the scenes, which at times does add a somewhat thriller element to the tale. How perseverance and hard work makes things happen, so this also reveals to us that the whole issue of longitude brought greater understandings in physics and our understanding of the universe around us, and why the world uses GMT.

⭐This book does not justify its rave reviews. It could be so much better. The introductory chapter has been merited as an unorthodox opening whereby all is revealed in brief, then the rest of the book fills in the detail. For me that is the major problem. When you know what happens the genie is out of the bottle and the t ale is just routine. The author is not a good story teller, either. There is much wholly detail about early efforts to solve the Longitude problem. That becomes tedious and could have been briefer considering that those early ideas were useless. There are no illustrations in a book that screams. for such things. No diagrams to explain the text where it would assist the reader. What a let-down. It’s worth a read but will end up at our local charity shop.

⭐”Here lies the real, hard-core difference between latitude and longitude—beyond the superficial difference in line direction that any child can see: The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.”To be brief, discovering a method of measuring Longitude in the 1700s was a “bit of a pig” until an amateur clockmaker from the North of England, entered the fray and battled royal astronomers, politicians, mathematicians, The Admiralty, and academics who believed that the “moon and stars” method was the answer. John Harrison believed that “the measurement of time” method was the answer. He was a simple carpenter from Yorkshire who the aristocracy delayed, hindered, cheated, lied to, threatened ……. but they were wrong in their assumptions, and John Harrison eventually proved it to claim the £20,000 prize with his H4 model.It’s a heck of a story you can read in Dava Sobel’s book, and you can see all of John Harrison’s models H1 to H4 at The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London. We were really motivated after reading this book to go and see these four mechanisms inside glass cases that changed the world, saved countless lives, enabling navigation not only on the high seas but also within our modern day satnavs. We stood in awe of Harrison just looking at them and knowing his story, his struggles, his battle to claim the prize money reinforced yet again how much this country gave the world through the Age of Reason then the Industrial Revolution. Sadly it seems that this kind of true story isn’t studied in our schools or universities these days!

⭐The detail and pace and now with illustrations make this an elegant insight into the history of Wind sail merchants and the added security of knowing your position better when the earliest trustworthy clocks could be taken on board for reference.

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