Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

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She introduces ideas as to why Sundarbans tigers eat so many people, including the theory, “When they attack people, perhaps they are trying to protect the land that they own.

Longitude Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

Many famous scientists, including Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin, appear in the story, but the solution to the “longitude problem” came from an unknown, self-educated clockmaker, John Harrison, who devoted forty years to the effort. He designed a new timepiece sealed in a vacuum container, and coined the term “chronometer”, which later came into general usage as the preferred name for a marine timekeeper. Discovering the "secret of the longitude" was therefore a great goal for any ship's captain and for any country with business, military or commercial, on the high seas.Harrison's trials and tribulations during his forty-year quest to win the prize are the culmination of this remarkable story.

LONGITUDE | Kirkus Reviews LONGITUDE | Kirkus Reviews

The zero degree of longitude, which is the prime meridian of London, is artificially defined and there is no natural law to follow.Even less promising were crackpot suggestions like taking along on shipboard a wounded dog that would presumably yelp on cue whenever someone at home would dip a cloth soaked with its blood in a solution of the miraculous ''powder of sympathy. Longitude is the story of English clockmaker John Harrison and how he figured out how to track longitude, or the east-west position of ships. All too often throughout the ages of exploration, voyages ended in disaster when crew and cargo were either lost at sea or destroyed upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. The Illustrated Longitude,The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel and William J.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the

Meanwhile, astronomers made catalogs of the locations of stars in the night sky and the moon’s position relative to the stars at any given time. He/the Board adopted unscrupulous methods to thwart Harrison: sabotage, backstabbing, and theft of intellectual property. Everybody knows about longitude but I guess not so many know the struggles and fights behind the tries to 'conquer' it, including myself.

The European continent was plunged into years of darkness marked by starvation, vengeance, ethnic cleansing, and civil war.

Longitude by Sobel, First Edition - AbeBooks Longitude by Sobel, First Edition - AbeBooks

Roughly one-quarter of the many letters I received after the publication of Longitude complained that the book contained no pictures, maps, or diagrams.To win the full prize, the method or device had to be accurate to within one-half degree on a trip from England to the West Indies. Harrison’s invention proved itself in the hearts and minds of the people who most needed accuracy, and though the astronomers’ lunar method remained useful, it was principally employed to check the accuracy of the timepieces. He had what one might term an astronomer's bias, which holds that the only solution worthy of the longitude problem could be solved by someone with the elite education of an astronomer, not a country watchmaker. But though Harrison had patrons interested in seeing him succeed, Harrison also made unlikely enemies.