Longitude

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bestseller, is the elegant biography of the lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his times. The author treats the difficulties Harrison encountered convincing the Board of Longitude of the efficacy of his devices as a matter of petty politics and egotism without offering the reader sufficient detail about the technical disputes to make any judgments about the scientific debate at the center of the controversy. For calculating longitude at sea however, early ocean navigators had to rely on dead reckoning, or if in sight of land, coastal navigation, which involves triangulating several bearings of the same land feature from different positions. 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. A practical solution came from a gifted carpenter, John Harrison, who solved one of the most difficult problems of his time by creating an accurate chronometer.

For the rest of his life, Harrison would devote himself to developing his chronometers and solving the longitude problem. I knew the gist of the John Harrison story prior to reading Longitude, but Dava Sobel goes beyond the accomplishments of this single man and charts the course of the problem, and all its proposed solutions. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.Harrison felt his chief nemesis was Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, a strong advocate of the astronomical method.

But though Harrison had patrons interested in seeing him succeed, Harrison also made unlikely enemies.how to remember that it's the latitudes and not the longitudes that are parallel, one trick is to associate the ''a'' sounds in latitude and parallel. It's not without flaws, but I was fascinated and gave it 5 stars for holding my attention in a topic I rarely read about, where science, math, politics, and culture intersect with astronomical and nautical history. this book presents the stories of the development of more and more accurate time pieces, alternative celestial positioning methods that were useless if overcast, and deciding and agreeing on where the standard time for comparison (today's Greenwich Mean Time) should be.