Grouch's Full Review: Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone G...
When you come right down to it, history is nothing more than a chain of tiny, connected events—the mundane, the trivial, the accidental invention. Think, for instance, where we’d be without the traffic light, the shoelace, the Post-it note. Someone had to invent those things, and I for one am glad they did.
In her book Longitude, Dava Sobel takes an in-depth look at one such invention: the marine chronometer.
Unless you’ve got sea salt running through your veins, chances are good you couldn’t pick a marine chronometer out of a police lineup. For those who sat at the back of the class during the nautical portion of their high school history lesson, the chronometer was an invention that helped ships determine longitude while sailing the high seas.
For those who slept through the longitude/latitude lecture in history class, I’ll give you one more chance: latitude refers to the imaginary parallel lines that circle the globe in an east-west direction; longitude refers to those lines that run in a north-south direction, converging at the poles. Since, as Sobel explains, lines of latitude are always parallel and thus unchanging, sailors could follow them easy enough.
But when it came to knowing how to determine longitude, all bets were off. To learn one’s longitude at sea, she writes, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude—at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation.
Have I lost you yet? If this thumbnail explanation seems confusing, don’t worry. Sobel takes the reader gently by the hand and guides even the most scientifically-challenged soul through the process. Here’s what you need to know: determining longitude was literally a matter of life or death. Ships ran aground on rocks and thousands of sailors died—all because the navigator made a slight miscalculation. Oops.
In our era of radar and global positioning satellites, it’s hard to imagine a cloudy night that obscured the moon and stars could spell disaster for ships at sea or that just one hair’s-breadth miscalculation could mean the difference between landing in Greenland or Cuba. That’s why inventing a marine chronometer was such a big deal during the eighteenth century.
Vessels had taken clocks on board before, but the rolling seas threw off the accuracy of pendulums, the humidity made the casings swell and the briny air rusted the inner mechanisms. When you’re a hundred miles from the nearest shoreline and the reassuring tick-tock suddenly stops, you realize you’re just another needle in the ocean’s haystack.
And so, in 1714 England’s Parliament offered what would today be one million dollars to anyone whose method of measuring longitude could be proven successful.
Enter John Harrison, a humble, middle-class clockmaker. I’ll let Sobel tell you about him:
With no formal education or apprenticeship to any watchmaker, Harrison nevertheless constructed a series of virtually friction-free clocks that required no lubrication and no cleaning, that were made from materials impervious to rust, and that kept their moving parts perfectly balanced in relation to one another, regardless of how the world pitched or tossed about them. He did away with the pendulum, and he combined different metals inside his works in such a way that when one component expanded or contracted with changes in temperature, the other counteracted the change and kept the clock’s rate constant.
So, all Harrison had to do was test his clock then march into Parliament and collect his million bucks, right? Wrong. (And this is where Sobel’s book turns as juicy as the most heart-pounding fiction). For years, governments had relied on the wisdom of astronomers to solve the longitude puzzle. In fact, the British government had determined that the royal astronomers would be the ones to regulate the contest and award the prize. Of course, they always believed that it would be a fellow astronomer who’d invent the perfect timepiece. Not some ill-educated clockmaker.
Even though Harrison had the perfect invention and was entitled to the cash prize, the Royal Society kept bending the rules away from this poor fellow. To make matters even worse, Harrison’s closest rival, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, was himself an astronomer. The bulk of Sobel’s fast-paced narrative details Harrison’s forty-year struggle to claim his rightful prize…and Maskelyne’s forty-year attempt to defeat Harrison at every turn. (By the way, was there ever a more sinister-sounding character name than “Nevil Maskelyne”? I get chills every time I say it to myself).
You may think reading a 175-page book about the history of a clock sounds like dry stuff, that you’d rather be making sweaters out of laundry lint or alphabetizing your grocery coupons instead. You may think you’ll break your jaw stifling yawns reading something with the full title of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
Trust me. You will not, for one instant, be bored by this gripping slice of history. Sobel has the skills of a novelist and the brain of a scientist (she was a former science reporter for The New York Times). Her words are always lively, her illustrations always vivid, her details always as intricate as the gears of a clock itself.
I can hardly wait to see what she does for Post-it notes.
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for ...More at HotBookSale
Sobel presents the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of John Harrison s 40-year obsession with building the perfect timekeeper, kno...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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