I read this in high school (so no detailed review) and remember enjoying it immensely.

"For the ocean's silence spoke a single, uniform, terrible message: 'You are lost, you are lost."

In "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time," I was taken on an exhilarating journey through the fascinating world of 18th-century navigation and the brilliant mind of John Harrison. The book, written by Dava Sobel, chronicles the extraordinary life and achievements of this lone genius who tackled the most pressing problem of his era – determining a ship's longitude at sea.

"Harrison never learned to add or multiply. Yet, using little more than sticks, pendulums, and loops of gut, he'd found a way to calculate the new day's noon as soon as the old day's was over. A day's worth of those bits and pieces would eventually add up to the only quantity that meant anything at all to him: time."

A quote that emphasizes that despite Harrison's lack of formal education in mathematics and arithmetic, he possessed an extraordinary talent for using simple tools like sticks, pendulums, and loops of gut to calculate and measure time accurately. This unique skill allowed him to devise innovative solutions that ultimately led to the creation of accurate maritime chronometers.

Sobel vividly transported me back to the Age of Exploration, where maritime trade, conquests, and scientific advancements were shaping the world. Navigational accuracy was paramount, yet the elusive concept of determining longitude plagued sailors and explorers, leading to countless shipwrecks and lost lives. Enter John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker whose determination and ingenuity led him to create a series of groundbreaking timepieces, known as chronometers.

The narrative expertly weaves between the challenges Harrison faced in developing his accurate chronometers and the political and scientific rivalries of the time. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich played a significant role in the story, as did the scientific establishment's skepticism of Harrison's unconventional methods. As I turned the pages, I marveled at the intricacies of clockmaking and the profound impact Harrison's chronometers had on navigation. The book illuminated the relationship between timekeeping and longitude, a connection that had eluded scholars and astronomers for centuries.

This book is a captivating account of a forgotten hero, an unsung genius whose dedication and brilliance reshaped the course of history. A must read!

I first read Longitude, by Dava Sobel, just after I finished high school, and I devoured it in a sitting or two. It was the first non-fiction book, I think, that I really couldn't put down.

The (true) story is great: legendary historical figures like Isaac Newton, Galileo, James Cook, King George III; scientific conundrums; innovative engineering; a ransom of millions at stake; and a humble, lone man competing against oppressive and manipulative big-wigs.

Background: Latitude lines are the parallel lines that circle the globe above and below the equator, and any sailor could figure out his latitude by measuring the length of the day or looking at the angle of the sun or the north star. But finding one's longitude, the lines that connected the north and south poles, was much more difficult. Anyone could determine that he was on the tropic of cancer, but determining how far along the tropic of cancer was a different challenge--one that, if solved, would revolutionize navigation and save countless lives.

In 1714, Parliament offered a purse worth 20,000 Pounds (millions today) to anyone who could solve the longitude problem. John Harrison was a quiet, hard-working clockmaker who believed he had found the way.

Re-reading this now, many of the details and events in the story remain as compelling as they were ten years ago. Longitude is a tremendous tale of battling scientists and the perseverance of hard work, brilliance, and humility through political intrigue and greed.

Do I recommend it? Yes, to anyone interested in history, science, engineering, geography, politics, astronomy, navigation, clockmaking...
Would I teach it? Not in an English class, but I'd refer to it as a great example of science writing.
Lasting Impression: This book keeps a wonderful balance between the personal, scientific, and political elements of the story. It's history you can escape into.

A great little read - I was inspired to read this one after being lucky enough to see the longitude exhibit and the Harrison clocks at the Greenwich Observatory a couple of years ago (only just got around to reading the book).

It's a great story and very well told - I mistakenly thought this was going to be a dramatisation / fictionalisation of the story - but it's not, it sticks purely to the historical facts.

Very well written and constructed - for anyone with even the vaguest of interest in the subject or even if you haven't - the determination, dedication, strive for perfection by John Harris and the political intrigue / subterfuge surrounding the Longitude Board / Royal Astronomers and the Longitude Prize is fascinating - it's just a great story and well worth a read.

In Longitude, Dava Sobel chronicles the world's quest to tame time. In 1714, the English Parliament passed the longitude act. It established the Board of Longitude and offered a prize of 20,000 pounds to anyone who could find a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude. In particular Sobel highlights John Harrison's pursuit of the prize. She traces the arc of his career, and details the innovations of each of his subsequent entries (H1-H5) Unfortunately, even though his Chronometers repeatedly proved their worth in Sea trial after sea trial, and the watch quickly gained adherents among sea captains, Harrison was thwarted at every turn in his attempt to claim the prize. Jealous rivals on the board used their influence to change the rules of the contest multiple times. His relations with the board became so acrimonious that eventually his friends went over the board's head and appealed directly to the King himself. George III asked that a special act of Parliament be passed and Harrison finally received his prize.

Despite it's brevity, Longitude is an incredibly engaging and educational book. Sobel writes in a way that makes the science and math accessible to the general reader.

If you're interested in this subject I'd also recommend the 2000 A&E movie, which was based on this book.

A bit dry at times...

Fascinating. I love reading tales of ships and pirates, and yet I never knew how hard the problem of "longitude" was to solve. Makes you appreciate the feat of sailing in the Golden Age even more.

Longitude is a sheer delight of a popular history of technology. Up until the 18th century, half of navigation was done by chance. Finding latitude is easy, simply take the angle between the horizon of the sun at noon or Polaris at night, adjust for the date, and you know where you are relative to the equator. But longitude is a different matter. Ships wandered in the great oceans, crews riddled with scurvy, or crashed into rising cliffs. The British government offered a prize of 20,000 Pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars today, for a solution to the longitude problem. Meanwhile, finding longitude was ridiculed as an impossible quest, on par with perpetual motion and squaring the circle.

Serious approaches to longitude centered on time. If you knew what time was at some fixed point, a home port, and could compare it to local time, then 1 hour of difference in time corresponded to 15 degrees of longitude. But keeping track of the time simply was not possible with contemporary clocks which gained or lost whole minutes in an hour on land. Shipboard conditions, with constant motion, dampness, and temperatures ranging from sweltering tropics to arctic gales, made the problem seem impossible.

Sobel follows the story of the man who cracked it, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire named John Harrison. Harrison developed the first chronometer, a clock which kept accuracy to within seconds under harsh maritime conditions. But Harrison's triumph was bedeviled by official opposition. The men who made up the longitude board were mostly astronomers, and they believed that the problem must be solved by reference to a celestial clock, either eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, or the position of the moon relative to major stars. British astronomer royal Nevil Maskelyne refused to accept a 'mere mechanic' had cracked the problem, instead preferring a method based on the moon.

After a decades long struggle, an elderly Harrison was awarded the money by Parliament, though not the prize. Chronometers were very expensive, ten times as expensive as an almanac of lunar ephemera, and navigators used lunar methods for decades. Harrison became the victor in the eyes of history. His chronometers are treasured artifacts. GPS, that omnipresent locator, relies on satellites and ultra-precise clocks. Longitude captures the spirit of the great age of exploration, and the taming of the leviathans in the blue spaces on the maps, in the best possible way.

A wonderful short read about the history of longitude. Highly recommend it for fans of maritime novels and colonialism enthusiasts- coz you gotta know the intricacies that went on in a ship to do something as simple as telling time, and if you want to concur lands, you need to know where you are going.

Stellar nonfiction, exceptionally well-written.
Technical enough to satisfy those who want the details; lucid enough for the non-technical to comprehend the central problem and its attempted solutions; engaging enough to draw in all kinds of readers. This book could get practically anyone excited about applied science through real-world problem solving.

Non-fiction about the quest to develop a reliable method for measuring longitude. The first several chapters describe the difficulties encountered by ships attempting to navigate solely based on latitude. The focus then shifts to a biography of John Harrison, the 18th century clockmaker who attempted to solve this problem based on timekeeping. It also describes his primary competitor and adversary, Nevil Maskelyne, who was keen on proving that the best approach involved astronomical readings. They and many others vied for the monetary prize offered by the British government. Along the way, the author highlights some of the more outlandish ideas, one of which involves barking dogs!

The book is far more than a scientific analysis of the problem of finding longitude. It portrays the intrigue, rivalries, conflicts, and accidental discoveries that make this book a fascinating reading experience. It is a story of the triumph of a perfectionistic genius of humble origins over the well-educated experts of the day. Recommended to those who, like me, enjoy stories related to travel by sea, voyages of exploration and discovery, and maritime adventures in days of yore.

Nowadays we can lose track of how scary and dangerous it can be to be lost.

We have GPS and apps to make location easy and our great and wild planet has been tagged, labeled and thoroughly domesticated.

But there was a time really not very long ago where if you were out at sea, you did not have a very exact idea where you were. Being lost at sea could mean running aground or becoming so off your planned trajectory that food stores could run out and your crew could face a slow death from starvation and dehydration.

There was navigation but it was limited in accuracy east or west, the north and south latitudes being more or less identifiable. Throughout the 1700s we follow the quest to solve this important problem for shipping, mapping, and safe and efficient navigation.

Writer Dava Sobel populates this short history with a cast of scientists, astronomers, engineers, mathematicians and - a carpenter. People who know such things figured out that clockmaking, building a durable and efficient chronometer would solve the longitude puzzle that had been plaguing mariners since time immemorial. We spend the next hundred odd years with behind the scenes story about how we went a long way towards not being lost.