Longitude

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If the proposed signal guns were loaded with cannon shells that shot more than a mile high into the air, and exploded there, sailors could time the delay between seeing the fireball and hearing its big bang.

In the tradition of praising people whose work made it possible to do things a little better - in this case navigate across seas using a map.I devoured this in a few days and since I am only able to devote about an hour a day at bedtime to eye-reading these days, that's quite an accomplishment. The British government offered a prize of 20,000 Pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars today, for a solution to the longitude problem.

Dava Sobel weaves a fascinating tale set against a problem centuries in the solving, one that vexed astronomers, clockmakers, and mariners alike but whose solution led to advances in all three fields. Harrison was awarded the prestigious Copley Gold Medal in 1749 at the recommendation of the Royal Society for the many innovations he had made in his clocks that made them so accurate and reliable. Finding latitude is easy, simply take the angle between the horizon of the sun at noon or Polaris at night, adjust for the date, and you know where you are relative to the equator. From a modern viewpoint with our easy-to-carry accurate time-telling devices and instant communication this problem, which a sailor faced in finding the exact time at two different locations, may feel far-fetched. Y no lo tuvo nada fácil, porque además de intentar construir sus máquinas de precisión, tuvo que hacer frente a la oposición de los astrónomos, empeñados en que su método era el mejor y más adecuado.Dava Sobel wrote an interesting narrative about an unlikely hero, John Harrison, who became enmeshed in a David and Goliath battle that lasted decades. And so each hour's time difference between the ship and starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude to the east or west. I thoroughly enjoyed it both times, although the technicalities of measuring Longitude were more difficult to comprehend when reading the paper book.

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. Therefore, a new breed of fleet must be dispatched and anchored at 600-mile intervals in the oceans shooting cannons in the air.The Royal Observatory in Greenwich played a significant role in the story, as did the scientific establishment's skepticism of Harrison's unconventional methods. This is a non-fiction book, which describes why knowing longitude is so important for sea voyages, multiple ways its correct and precise estimation was suggested and finally a life and struggle of John Harrison, the inventor of chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, LONGITUDE is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation and clockmaking. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002. But it’s good to know that if the GPS network ever goes down, there is at least one museum I can rob for some high-quality longitude calculation devices.

The economic losses and the loss of life was so staggering that finding a solution to the problem was elevated to the almost legendary level of finding the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. I did start to feel like the book needed some diagrams or pictures, because it got really difficult forming mental images of such obscure and complex devices. Un barco podía pensar que estaba arribando a su destino cuando quizás era todo lo contrario, o podía colisionar con elementos desconocidos provocando su hundimiento. Once out of sight of land, longitude became impossible to calculate, which sometimes led to tragedies in stormy or foggy conditions. One of the interesting solutions was presented by William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton, mathematicians and friends.All in all, I ended up feeling like Sobel had manufactured a bunch of tension and drama, but not actually delivered on filling in the colour and texture of it all. However, there was no need for it for a self-taught English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who devoted his life to the quest for portable precision timekeeping. 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. In the early 1700s, determining a ship's position was a highly imprecise and challenging process as the main method of navigation was by dead reckoning, guided only by compass and the direction of the sun's path. As I turned the pages, I marveled at the intricacies of clockmaking and the profound impact Harrison's chronometers had on navigation.