An amazing book.

I totally enjoyed listening to this audio book. Dava Sobel always researches her books well, and they exude a love of science that I share. This particular book takes us through a history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking. It focuses mainly on John Harrison's effort to imagine a mechanical solution to the longitude problem: a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. After listening, I spent time searching the internet to get a glimpse of the clocks themselves. Check Youtube to find lots of great stories about the clocks.

To quote an esteemed LC history professor on the technical difficulties of pre-modern navigational technology: "Nowadays, you'd refer to that as being lost. But they actually thought they could get somewhere." Shortly after people discovered that the world was round and wanted to sail around it, they realized that they had no way of telling how far they'd gone and how close they were to where they wanted to be, as opposed to how close they were to the Bermuda Triangle, for example, or the giant pointy sneak-attack rocks that were about to sink their ship. The kingdoms of Enlightenment Europe were basically racing against each other to find a way to calculate longitude that worked better than eyeballing the north star with a sextant on a pitching deck, which pretty much didn't work at all. Longitude is the story of John Harrison, the man who invented the first clock accurate enough to keep time at sea, allowing navigators to know exactly where they were on an East-West scale. Harrison, and the reader, get sucked into a whirlpool of royal and scientific politics, which can get very dirty. Also has a cameo appearance by everyone's favorite benignly insane monarch, George III.

Audible sale (#22 of 40) 4 hours 20 min. Narrated by Kate Reading (B)

Interesting history of the invention of a clock that would withstand all the vagaries presented aboard sailing ships that would allow navigation by calculation of the longitude of the ship once sight of shore was lost. A Goodreads review led to my discovery of this book.

Some people really geek out on the history of science and innovation, especially that magical era at the dawn of the age of reason and the industrial revolution. I'm that sort of geek, so this book was just perfect for me.

The longitude problem was one of the biggest scientific problems facing humanity in the early 1700s. The British government posted a large reward — the equivalent of millions of dollars. The Longitude prize was a forerunner to modern innovation prizes like the X Prize for launching a manned spacecraft into orbit, and the Orteig prize for a direct flight across the Atlantic (won by Charles Lindbergh).

Longitude and latitude are coordinates for naming a location on the globe. Latitude identifies North-South position (for example, Canada and Mexico are at different latitudes) while longitude identifies East-West position (for example, Japan and California are at different longitudes).

Ships were traveling all over the globe by the 1600s, but they could only determine their latitude (by observing the stars) while at sea. Longitude was just a guess. So you'd have the clumsy situation of a fleet of ships traveling someplace and sailing back and forth along the latitude trying to find the island they were looking for. Unlucky guesses could result in many deaths.

It's hard to imagine this today, but solving the longitude problem would be equivalent in modern times to landing on the moon or curing cancer.

This book documents the half century that the one man who eventually solved it, and along the way he made horology (clock engineering) into an important and respected craft. His struggles are not just technical, but also political and personal.

I liked the writing style (curt, it lets the drama of the events speak for themselves) and the chapters are a perfect bite-sized length.

A friend of mine told me about this book - I never knew that longitude was beyond navigators' collective grasp as late as it was, or that it was monumentally harder to determine than latitude. It's fascinating.

Besides the central story of how a self-taught clock-maker, John Harrison, spent his lifetime perfecting a clock accurate and hardy enough to remember Greenwich time on long voyages through various temperatures, the rolling of the sea, and different humidities and barometric pressures, the book explains other ways to determine longitude using the skies (if you can get an accurate reading and the data exists to predict where the moon should be with respect to the sun for 3 hour periods for the length of your voyage, and it's not cloudy).

Navigators also were able to determine longitude, theoretically, by observing the moons of Jupiter, whose orbits were easier to predict, but were much harder to see on a rocking boat.

So Galileo, who discovered the Jovian moons, gets a couple of cool points here (like he needed any more). In fact, the Jupiter moon method (and every method is about figuring out what time it is in Greenwich right now - if we know when a person in Greenwich would see what we just saw - for example, a moon of Jupiter going behind the planet - we know how far ahead or behind Greenwich we are), while so impractical on ships that navigators on ships had to wait for a good clock (although that took 150 years after the invention of Galileo's method), was great on land, and it's the cause of maps suddenly looking accurate and not grossly distorted east/west-wise just after 1600.

Isaac Newton also makes a special appearance (you know, predicting our moon's orbit well).

Oh yeah - you also have to see the wonderful clocks this guy made (there are color plates in some editions)- they're steampunk perfection.

Anyway, I hope I've conveyed the enthusiasm I feel for this short, but just-right-length, science history.

I take GPS for granted. I don’t use it that much personally, because I don’t tend to go anywhere, but I’m sure all this technology I love to use makes use of GPS. Thanks to GPS, we can forget that calculating longitude without the help of a network of satellites is difficult and requires great mathematical and engineering expertise. GPS might not be great at giving directions, but that doesn’t mean you’re lost.

In the days—centuries—prior to GPS, you could get lost. Really lost. I’m not sure how to describe how lost you could be, out there on the ocean, no longer in sight of shore. Latitude was relatively easy—well, easy enough once you dealt with the pitching deck, the storms, and the scurvy. Latitude corresponds both to the sun’s altitude in the sky (at noon) and to the altitude of certain stars (if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris is a good choice) at night. So you could figure out how far away from the equator or the poles. But how far away were you from the nearest charted island? And were you to the east of it, or the west?

Longitude, or rather the “starting point” for lines of longitude, is entirely arbitrary. The only way to calculate longitude is to measure the difference in time between two points: the reference point (e.g., 0° longitude) and your current location. That sounds easy enough: just take a watch with you that’s set to London time, and at noon at your current location, check what time the watch reports.

Much like our skill at flinging sophisticated pieces of technology into orbit has advanced, so too has our ability to construct watches. For the longest time, the solution to calculating longitude eluded mariners because no one could construct a clock that was both accurate enough and durable enough. The constant changes in pressure, humidity, and temperature played havoc with the fine mechanisms that allowed clocks to keep time. Without accuracy, a watch is useless as a method to calculate longitude.

This problem consumed great minds for centuries. It eventually came to a head in 1714, when the English Parliament authorized the creation of a Board of Longitude to disperse prizes for new ways of accurately calculating longitude. The grand prize was £20,000—or $12 million in today’s currency. Longitude was a big deal.

I knew the gist of the John Harrison story prior to reading Longitude, but Dava Sobel goes beyond the accomplishments of this single man and charts the course of the problem, and all its proposed solutions. She sets up a context against which the true scope and power of Harrison’s achievement might be measured. As I explained above, the general solution to calculating longitude was long in evidence, but no one could think of a way to effect it. Galileo had some good ideas related to his observations of Jupiter’s moon, but they were hardly practical for marine navigation. Later, Newton and other English scientists were convinced that astronomy held the key to calculating longitude—and the king agreed with them, establishing the Royal Observatory for the purpose of cataloguing the stars. More than a simple puzzle that made academics scratch their heads, the problem of longitude affected society and the economy. It drove scientific inquiry and technological innovation. Watching this unfold through Sobel’s storytelling is breathtaking and inspiring.

Harrison’s origins read like something out of a fairy tale or a superhero book. His father was a carpenter, and he was trained as a carpenter, not as a watchmaker. Yet this craft fascinated him, so he trained himself to build clocks. In fact, he built a clock entirely out of wood, a clock that required no lubrication owing to the way he had constructed it and the type of wood he had used. John Harrison was not just a tinker or dabbler; he was a creative genius. So he decided to solve the longitude problem. And he did. But when he went to London for his reward, he was met with scepticism, animosity, and belligerence. Thanks to the politics of London, the Board of Longitude was populated by representatives from the astronomy camp, and they were none too keen on Harrison’s mechanical marvel. For the rest of his life, Harrison would improve upon his prototype and receive stipends from the Board, but that recognition and prize money lay beyond his reach.

I personally think we tend to put too much stock in the “great individual” approach to history. I can see why it is appealing for stories, and for works of popular history: our ability to turn history into a biography boils away our dislike of dates and dry facts and lets us focus on the relationships and motivations of the characters. The central conflict of Longitude is not the need to calculate longitude but the antagonistic relationship between the Harrisons and the Reverend Maskelyne. Maskelyne championed the “lunar distance” method of calculating longitude. It just so happened, too, that later on in his life he became the Astronomer Royal, and therefore a member of the Board of Longitude. That didn’t go over well for Harrison’s chances at being awarded that prize.

Indeed, echoes of the great rivalries across the ages surface in Longitude, reminding us that science is never as simple nor as objective as we like to think. Invention is partly innovation, partly inspiration, and part imitation. Sobel is careful to stress that Maskelyne was not the villain in this piece, merely the antagonist—like the feud between Newton and Hooke, the feud between Harrison and Maskelyne was a dispute between two men who knew their stuff. But where ego is concerned and establishing primacy is often necessary for the money and prestige that follows a discovery, tempers will flare and harsh words will be exchanged.

So with this centuries-old problem juxtaposed against a feud between a rural carpenter-turned-watchmaker and the Astronomer Royal, Sobel turns Longitude from a history book into an exciting story. The trick to making any historical account interesting lies in exposing the details and connections that a casual reader, like myself, wouldn’t necessarily know. Sobel does this by charting the connections between Harrison and luminary contemporaries, including Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Christopher Wren. She does this even with the considerable handicap of lacking much evidence about Harrison’s early life.

Sobel also goes into the intricate inner workings of Harrison’s successive marine chronometers. The genesis and evolution of the marine chronometer, particularly once it had spread to other watchmakers, gave us not only an accurate way to calculate longitude but other useful horological innovations! As Sobel describes the clever devices he designed to solve the limitations of sea clocks, all I could think was, “I have no idea what she is trying to say. This book could use pictures.” Lo and behold, as I reached the middle of the volume, I stumbled into the glossy inset that includes diagrams of a grasshopper escapement and photos of Harrison’s portrait and the chronometers H–1 through H–4. It’s amazing that these timekeepers (with the exception of H–4) continue to run today.

I wish Longitude were longer, but at the same time I love the size of the book as it is. My edition is a nice little paperback copy with a beautiful, high-quality cover. It is compact and deceptively slim for such an interesting history. Yet it is also definitely just a survey. I’m not sure, given the lack of details, how much longer Sobel could have spun it out. But the episodic nature of the chapters, and the abbreviated way she communicates the stories of the testing of H–3, H–4, etc., by Captain Cook and others, seems to indicate that there is more here to tell. Or is that another story?

Oh well. I really liked Longitude. It has the perfect mix of narrative, character, and scientific explanation to make it a fascinating work of history of science. Dava Sobel weaves a fascinating tale set against a problem centuries in the solving, one that vexed astronomers, clockmakers, and mariners alike but whose solution led to advances in all three fields. I, personally, rely on my GPS devices to find my longitude. But it’s good to know that if the GPS network ever goes down, there is at least one museum I can rob for some high-quality longitude calculation devices.

Now excuse me while I draw up some blueprints….

n  n

An amazing book following the attempts to solve the longitudinal navigation problems. The author’s research covered several hundred years of partial success and many failures. Especially interesting was the English contest for solving the problem. An amazing man, John Harrison, worked tirelessly to conquer the problem. The trials of Harrison, and the jealously of others in his attempts made for a good story.. This genius is credited with producing the first marine machine to accurately calculate longitude. Then he reduced his machine to a marine watch. He made numerous chronometers and many of them may be seen in the Royal Observatory and other places in England.

Well written and documented with bibliography .

An excellent non-fiction account of a watch maker. A man who would not give up despite vainglorious individuals who attempted to thwart his every step to test and prove his chronometer could accurately function on board a ship in the days of sail. Why is it important to have accurate time pieces in the middle of oceans? Longitude determination. Finding latitude was known. Using a compass was a given. Without longitude a sailor would find his ship wrecked on rocks in a moments notice or be so far off course as to have no chance to find drinking water or replenish stores in time to spare the crew disease or death.

Well done, Dava Sobel.

I remember visiting Royal Museums Greenwich in London with my children several years ago. We marveled at the big, intricate perpetually ticking H1, H2 and H3, and ignored the small, silent, seemingly nondescript H4, just like the tourists Dava Sobel noticed in her book. Now I wish I have had a closer look at H4, the actual prize-winning marine timekeeper made by the lone genius John Harrison.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is a well-written popular science book of how the longitude problem was solved, clear and concise, suitable for kids too.

Interesting review of the tale toward discovering a correct way to measure longitude for a ship at sea. It's short and informative but actually quite on the dry side. Not told in a fictionalized sense at all, but more a recital of fact, placements, and progression. The clock maker who succeeded with that bio-metal strip that did not alter the time by expansion or shrinking of the components became part of the key. As most innovation of great magnitude, it was a self-appointed task, completely by an individual.

John Harrison should get his due. Especially within trade ships of earlier periods his work probably saved countless lives. Unsung hero.

He was one of just two survivors who washed ashore, after their fleet hit the rocks of Scilly and more than two thousand men went to their watery graves in just minutes. He was barely conscious but alive. He was Sir Clowdisley, the admiral of the tragic fleet, and he had mistakenly steered his ships to disaster. One of his sailors tried to call attention to the upcoming catastrophe...but was immediately hanged. Inferior seamen were not allowed to keep their own calculations of maritime reckoning, not in 1707. Karma had the last laugh, as the Admiral went to his own reckoning. A beachcomber found the bedraggled officer...and immediately murdered him for the ring on his finger.

So begins this book's quest to tell the story of the desperate need to solve the problem of finding longitude while at sea. One group of scientists believed the moon and the stars held the secret, while another group focused on clocks. John Harrison was the nondescript genius who found the answer, but then had to spend the rest of his years fighting the establishment to get the recognition and the reward.

This book ended much too quickly. It's a bit of a whirlwind through the entire period, and I really wished for more background on each character. But, a good ride is a good ride. Amazingly, Harrison's first three clocks continue to tick centuries later, which is quite an achievement. Were he alive today, he would surely be part of the Google workplace.

Book Season = Winter (when the Atlantic is most angry)