Longitude
The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
The story of John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clockmaker who spent forty years building the first marine chronometer precise enough to solve the longitude problem -- and the scientific establishment that fought him every step of the way.
Before GPS, before satellite navigation, before even the simplest electronic instruments, sailors at sea could determine their latitude with reasonable confidence but had no reliable way to know their longitude. Ships ran aground. Fleets were lost. Thousands of sailors died. The British Parliament offered a prize of twenty thousand pounds to whoever could solve it – equivalent to millions today.
John Harrison, a self-educated clockmaker from Lincolnshire, spent the better part of his life building a series of chronometers so precise that a ship could carry the time of a known port across any ocean and calculate its position with accuracy. His clocks worked. The scientific establishment of the day, committed to an astronomical solution, spent decades blocking him from the prize he was owed.
Dava Sobel’s book is short – about 170 pages – and reads quickly, but it covers real ground: the physics of the problem, the politics of the Longitude Board, the mechanics of Harrison’s clocks, and the way that navigational precision changed the relationship between nations and oceans.
For anyone spending time at sea with a chartplotter or even a paper chart, this is a book that will make you think about the history underneath those tools. Every time you check your GPS position, you are benefiting from the problem Harrison solved. This is the story of how it got solved.
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