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The history of the quest to be able to determine longitude while at sea which would help avoid deadly accidents by sailors not knowing exactly where they were and crashing into shorelines. The English parliament issued a prize to whoever came up with a solution to the problem. There were two lines of main research into solving the problem, one involving mapping the moon and stars and one involving a clock that would work at sea. John Harrison spent 40 years perfecting a timepiece which would end
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I can honestly say that I have never once thought about longitude or what it means, or how it was discovered. This was an interesting book about the process of scientific discovery in the 1600s-1700s. I think we like to think of our current time period as being the most innovative and scientific, but when you think of the political and economic support provided during this time period to solve problems, I started to wonder if we are in the dark ages now! I think the book could have been shorter
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