ed_grover's Full Review: Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone G...
I think I certainly would have squirmed a lot if I had been handed this kind of reading material as a kid, but author Dava Sobel makes Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time ultimately very interesting. Reading this small book (only 175 pages) was a snap on a Sunday afternoon. The language is never so technical that you can’t understand it and the author spoon-feeds us more information on latitude and longitude than we know we are getting.
When I saw the film on the Arts & Entertainment channel (A&E) I knew I had to read the book. I also remembered seeing Sobel on C-SPAN2, where she appeared as a member of a panel on Book TV. Each of the chapters is headed by a quote from a classic writer or poet that relates to the subject in one form or another. In the first, “Imaginary Lines,” the quote is from Mark Twain. Others are from W.H. Auden, Robert Burns and Samuel Taylor Colleridge.
In an interview on AandE.com, the author says she remembers chuckling when I got invited to a conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of Harrison's birth, because it sounded like such a strange, esoteric event, and I really knew nothing about the subject. But once there, I was captivated by the quality of the event and the story itself. You don't think there's anything to those lines on maps and globes. They just appear to be some kind of background grid. But then you realize that for a long time they represented life or death and that there is a very involved, compelling history to being able to figure it out.
The author begins by telling of a childhood excursion she made with her father in New York City. Daddy bought her a beaded wire ball that she loved. It was collapsible and she could lay it flat in her hands or like a map or, rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth. She says, A few beads slid along the wire paths like ships on the high seas. They then stopped at Rockefeller Center to stare at the statue of Atlas holding a bronze orb aloft. Even then she could recognize a powerful symbol of all the real lands and waters on the planet.
About that experience she says, Today the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them—with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn due to war or peace.
With this in mind we are off on an adventure of cartography, astronomy and the inventions the scientists from before the birth of Christ, through Ptolmy’s twenty-seven maps, and on to the efforts of seafaring men like Captain William Bligh of the Bounty and the great circumnavigator Captain James Cook. Other scientists who made an effort to solve the L&L problem were Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, to name but a few.
I will not repeat (much) from my review of the TV movie, but I must say that Sobel devotes a considerable amount of space to Admiral Sir Cloudisley Shovell, and the sinking of four of His Majesty’s ships with 2000 men aboard, near the Isles of Scilly. As I read I could recall the pictures from the film clearly. I could see the scavengers picking the valuables off of the dead seamen.
All this brought about the Longitude Act of Queen Anne in 1714, that offered an award of £20,000 (a huge sum then) for the solution to the problem of longitude. With that she gives us examples of the outrageous string of quacks and frauds who appeared before the Board of Longitude with their so-called amazing inventions--and there are many more here than appeared in the movie. Sobel tells us that many, if not most, of the solutions to the longitude problem were inspired by nothing more than greed. Many of the men in the competition made a sport of ridiculing other inventors by ways of pamphlets, etc.
There are chapters devoted to the why the sailors desperately needed a solution to the problem: Captains routinely missed their marks while their crews died of scurvy. Forced to sail by latitude alone, all the ships at sea (including the pirates) were forced to travel along the same well-traveled routes where they fell prey to one another.
Previously, sailors made sightings by looking directly at the sun through a sighting stick called the Jacob’s staff. This resulted more likely than not in blindness in one eye for these early navigators. In 1595, a device was introduced that allowed sailors to reverse their positions and view the sun in reverse over their backs. The magnetic compass was invented in the 12th century, but it, too, was not immune to problems with finding true north. “Rare was the compass needle that pointed precisely north at all times.”
John Harrison, an unknown clockmaker comes into the story in 1736, shortly after the passage of the famed Longitude Act. Harrison made a promising trial voyage aboard H.M.S. Centurion, and the ships officers saw first-hand how his clock could improve their computations when he showed them to be 60 miles off course on the way home.
Harrison worked on four versions of his timepieces over a period of fifty years. All through this time the Board of Longitude finagled with and changed the rules for the prize. The wanted a scientist to win and they considered Harrison nothing but a country carpenter with an unpleasant way of speaking. One by one these men died off, but Harrison and his son William kept at them, until one day William went directly to King George III to seek help. The king was intrigued with the idea and helped them test the newest clock. He went directly to Parliament and they forced the Board of Latitude to award Harrison (some of) the prize money.
We find out that as little was known about John Harrison as was known about Lieutenant Commander Rupert Gould. Gould was the man who found and restored Harrison’s timepieces after the Reverend Neville Maskelyne had literally dumped them in the basement of the Greenwich Observatory covered with 200 years of dirt and grime.
The author closes out her book with a visit to the prime meridian of the world--in the courtyard of the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich. At night buried lights shine through the glass-covered meridian line, so it glows like a man-made ocean rift, splitting the globe in two equal halves with all the authority of the equator. For a little added fanfare after dark, a green laser projects the meridian’s visibility ten miles across the valley to Essex. Harrison’s machines are there and running, thanks to the dedicated work of Rupert Gould.
This was a fabulous read and a great way to get a bit of knowledge that I never would have accumulated on my own. Dava Sobel knows whereof she writes. The author is an award-winning former science reporter for the New York Times. (Walker & Co., ISBN: 0-8027-1312-2).
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