When a nationally-sponsored contest offered a hefty cash prize to the person who could develop a method to accurately determine longitude, the race was on. As Amazon points out in their review, there’s plenty of drama and political intrigue to go around: A tall order indeed.ĭava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time tells the surprisingly gripping and dramatic tale of Harrison’s forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, an achievement even Newton and Galileo before him had failed to conquer. One man, John Harrison - a self-educated carpenter and clockmaker - set out to solve this problem by developing a friction-free clock that could keep precise time at sea, regardless of temperature, air pressure, humidity, salty air, and even a ship’s pitch and roll. Until then, I’ve got another bit of great weekend reading for you, and it’s about a technology we take for granted nowadays but was utterly revolutionary in its time (pun intended): the chronometer.īefore the 18th century, sailors had no way of telling their longitude at sea, and even the most experienced of them could find themselves lost as soon as land was out of sight, or shipwrecked upon encountering unexpected shores. This week’s Quality Linkage column is in the works for later today.
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