perturber's Full Review: Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone G...
Throughout the ages, scientists from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton had mapped the heavens searching for an answer to mankind's most important nautical problem: how to determine how far you had sailed in degrees of longitude (east to west).
Latitude was no problem -- just plot the sun and moon's course and you knew how far north or south you had sailed. Longitude, on the other hand, could not be determined, a fact that led to many shipwrecks and loss of lives and cargo.
In 1714, England's Parliament offered a reward to anyone who could discover a way to determine longitude while at sea. Scientists offered competing ideas in order to win the reward. Most of the offerings were celestial in nature (including Newton's). It fell to an amateur scientist (a watchmaker) named John Harrison to offer the solution that finally prevailed.
Please don't think I have given away the ending -- the story is in the quest for scientific knowledge, not who the eventual winner was.
Dava Sobel is a well-respected writer. Her presentation of Longitude, however, felt like her writing style is a bit stilted. This book is a serious treatment of a serious subject, but can't we loosen the prose just a bit? Overall, however, I think that the subject is worth the effort of the read.
I enjoy these topics quite a bit. If you have a science "bent", you will enjoy Longitude by Dava Sobel.
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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