Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time in Around the World in 80 Books

Nov 08, 2016 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: science, history, history-of-science, narrative-nonfiction, biography, microhistory

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch.

If you read Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and are eager for more, Longitude will be right up your alley. (I've read so many "history of science" type books, I'm thinking I should create a GR shelf just for them.) A lot of t

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch.

If you read Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and are eager for more, Longitude will be right up your alley. (I've read so many "history of science" type books, I'm thinking I should create a GR shelf just for them.) A lot of the stars of History make an appearance, including Galileo, Cassini, Newton, Huygens, Hooke, Halley, and Euler.

I read this as a biography of John Harrison, watch-maker and longitude measurer, but that doesn't start until chapter 7, a fulll 33% into the book.

The most accurate description is that this is a micro history of the development of time-keeping instruments that allowed seamen to measure longitude accurately. If that sounds kind of dry, well, it is. This is interesting, well-written, readable, and brief, but it's not exactly scintillating. This tale is a fine example of how beauraucratic red tape is no modern invention, if anything it was even worse back in the early 1700s!

I learned one shocking factoid: keeping track of your location on the ocean was a hanging offense!

...on that foggy night of October 22, 1707, the Scillies became unmarked tombstones for almost two thousand of Sir Clowdisley’s troops.

The flagship, the Association, struck first. She sank within minutes, drowning all hands. Before the rest of the vessels could react to the obvious danger, two more ships, the Eagle and the Romney, pricked themselves on the rocks and went down like stones. In all, four of the five warships were lost.

Only two men washed ashore alive. One of them was Sir Clowdisley himself, who may have watched the fifty-seven years of his life flash before his eyes as the waves carried him home. Certainly he had time to reflect on the events of the previous twenty-four hours, when he made what must have been the worst mistake in judgment of his naval career. He had been approached by a sailor, a member of the Association’s crew, who claimed to have kept his own reckoning of the fleet’s location during the whole cloudy passage. Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy, as the unnamed seaman well knew. However, the danger appeared so enormous, by his calculations, that he risked his neck to make his concerns known to the officers. Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot.

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Feb 26, 2014 Ken rated it it was amazing

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Wonderful history of technology tale which is kind of a prime example of the genre. Sobel writes a compelling story of the lone inventor who struggles all his life to create a world-changing invention, and to get the world to recognize its potential. A few years after I read this book, I went to the Greenwich Observatory in England, which was quite a treat.

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