Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time by Dava Sobel is the story of John Harrison and his effort to solve the calculation of the longitude aboard ship.
Started: 8/18/2012
Completed: 8/27/2012
Recommendation: Strongly recommended
Recommended By: Nobody
Review:
I had no idea that calculating Longitude was largely a matter of carrying time around. While other methods were developed over the 50+ years of John Harrison's pursuit of the longitude prize, having an accurate clock was the easiest and best. With GPS we all take for granted that it is easily within anyone's grasp to know their exact location, but in the 18th century navigation on the high seas was truly a guessing game with outrageous methods competing with methods that had some merit. Galileo was the first to come up with a reliable means of finding longitude (using the Jovian moons), but it wasn't until John Harrison that longitude could be reliably calculated on the sea. Keeping a telescope focused on Jupiter was more than anyone could do on a ship on all but the calmest of nights and then the calculations to determine longitude were non-trivial and required substantial tables of predicted locations of the moons. Most clocks of the time were pendulum clocks which were horribly effected by the rolling of the deck. John Harrison invented a clock that was not effected by changes in heat, humidity, and rolling of the ship and that, eventually, won him the longitude prize (literally a king's ransom). What a great book!
Dava Sobel, as always, is evocative and careful with her prose. At points, her sentences even take on a tick-tock sing-song picked up by the actor who read the book. It is a joy to hear this book, but I'm certain that reading it would be excellent as well.
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