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

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Without longitudinal calculations, many ships became lost. During long voyages, calculating one's distance became nearly impossible to gauge with serious accuracy. 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. The British legislature set up a Board of Longitude which had the authority to offer an award to anyone who could solve the problem. The book is about John Harrison's long, bedeviled question to built an incredibly accurate time-piece that could resist the vagaries of the sea.

Longitude — The Glass Universe

Dutton's Navigation and Piloting, 12th edition. G.D. Dunlap and H.H. Shufeldt, eds. Naval Institute Press 1972, ISBN 0-87021-163-3

friendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1. publ. in the United States of America. External-identifier The major theme of the book is the extraordinary and surprising sources of excellence. Harrison is an uneducated, idiosyncratic English countryman, yet he solved a problem that even Isaac Newton had not. It is also the story of the pettiness of the jealous, particularly embodied in the bitter Nevil Maskelyne. Many are threatened by the greatness of others, particularly if that greatness threatens one's status. This leads to the standard historical phenomenon of hostility to persons of great creativity and inventiveness. The history of this procedure plays an important part in the plot of Umberto Eco's new novel, ''The Island of the Day Before.'')

Dava Sobel - Wikipedia

Her book Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. [2] Dava Sobel in November 2007 The inability to solve the longitude problem for so long also had dire consequences. If a ship didn't know how far to the east or west it had traveled, then it didn't know where land was likely to be, and the unexpected contiguity of land had I read this book many years ago and have gifted or recommended it to many people since. It is utterly fascinating to read about the extend of human inginuity, but also entertaing to see some of the hair-brained alternative schemes that were considered to addresz this problem. We have now summarized of the major points of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Let’s recall what we’ve learned. This is a review of a wonderfully fascinating book that I read in (say) April 1999 and listened to as an audiobook sometime about 24 May 2015. I thoroughly enjoyed it both times, although the technicalities of measuring Longitude were more difficult to comprehend when reading the paper book. Fortunately my somewhat dim memory assisted my comprehension as I listened to the audiobook.But though Harrison had patrons interested in seeing him succeed, Harrison also made unlikely enemies. Many of the scientific elite, some of which tasked with review and approval of submissions to the Longitude Act, saw Harrison, a simple carpenter with no formal training or schooling, as naive and unworthy of serious consideration, let alone the immense grand prize. They saw his mechanical solution to such a literally astronomical problem as idealistic at best. At worst, it was lumped together with the other nonsensical or impossible solutions submitted. Some of these other submissions included injuring dogs at regular intervals to illicit yelps. It was Ptolemy in ‘ Geographia’, written in the 2nd century, who contributed the concept of a co-ordinate system based on the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude, for accurately plotting any spot on the surface of earth. With these imaginary lines he bought a new light in to the maritime explorations and map-making methods of his time. The sailors while at the ocean found it pretty straightforward to find their current latitude - which is drawn parallel to each other while girdling the globe – by measuring the height of the sun or any known celestial bodies.

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

La Historia está llena de pequeños descubrimientos capaces de cambiar el mundo. Aunque debería decir pequeños vistos desde nuestros días. Este es el caso de la longitud, es decir, esas líneas imaginarias que trazan nuestro planeta desde los polos, dividiéndolo en veinticuatro partes iguales. La longitud era fundamental en tierra firme para trazar mapas lo más exactos posibles, pero sobre todo era esencial para la navegación. El mundo era un gran desconocido cuyos horizontes estaban todavía por descubrir y el único medio para hacerlo era en barco, surcando esos océanos y mares ignotos donde cualquier error de cálculo podía suponer perderse en su inmensidad y morir con seguridad, ya sea por la escasez de agua potable y alimentos como por escorbuto. 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. Dava Sobel is an accomplished writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Ms. Sobel attended Antioch College and the City College of New York before receiving her bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002.

Hay que pensar en la longitud como un elemento asociado al tiempo. Si tenemos en cuenta que circunvalar la Tierra supone 360º, que se dividen en 24 meridianos de longitud, obtenemos una separación entre ellos de 15º, calculándose cada grado en minutos. Por lo tanto es fundamental saber en todo momento el tiempo real tanto en el barco como en el lugar desde el que se ha partido o el de destino. Parece simple, con un simple reloj arreglado. Pero no es tan fácil como parece, porque la temperatura y la presión atmosférica afectan mucho la maquinaria de los relojes, adelantándolos o retrasándolos o simplemente parándolos. El capitán pensaba que estaba a X minutos de su destino y se encontraba con que el tiempo pasaba y no arribaban a lugar alguno. Y aquí entraban en juego los partidarios de los relojes y los que preferían guiarse por el mapa estelar, mirando el cielo. Podcast of Dava Sobel discussing The Origins of Longitude at the Shanghai International Literary Festival