Amazon.com Review Dava Sobel's Longitude tells the story of how 18th-century scientist and clockmaker William Harrison solved one of the most perplexing problems of history--determining east-west location at sea. This lush, colorfully illustrated edition adds lots of pictures to the story, giving readers a more satisfying sense of the times, the players, and the puzzle. This was no obscure, curious difficulty--without longitude, ships often found themselves so far off course that sailors would starve or die of scurvy before they could reach port. 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. In the end, the battle of accuracy--and wills--fought between Harrison and arch-rival Maskelyne was ruthless and dramatic, worthy of a Hollywood feature film. Longitude's story is surprising and fascinating, offering a window into the past, before Global Positioning Satellites made it look easy. --Therese Littleton
Product Description When Dava Sobel's Longitude was published to universal acclaim in 1995, readers voiced only one regret: that it was not illustrated. Now, William Andrewes, the man who organized and hosted the Longitude Symposium that inspired her book, has joined Dava Sobel to create a richly illustrated version of her classic story.
The Illustrated Longitude recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the thorniest scientific problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the great age of exploration, sailors attempted to navigate the oceans without any means of measuring their longitude: All too often, voyages ended in total disaster when both crew and cargo were captured or lost upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of seafaring nations hung on a resolution.
To encourage a solution, governments established major prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward of £20,000-truly a king's ransom-was offered by the British Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment-from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton-had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that solved the problem by keeping precise time at sea, called today the chronometer. His trials and tribulations to win the prize throughout a forty-year obsession are the culmination of this remarkable story.
The Illustrated Longitude contains the entire original narrative of Longitude, redesigned to accompany 178 images chosen by Will Andrewes: from portraits of every important figure in the story to maps, diagrams, and photographs of scientific instruments, especially John Harrison's remarkable clocks. Andrewes's elegant captions emphasize the scientific and historical events surrounding the images, and they tell their own dramatic story of longitude, paralleling and illuminating Dava Sobel's memorable tale.
A classic, now beautifully illustratedJune 6, 2000 J Scott Morrison(Middlebury VT, USA) 25 out of 27 found this review helpful
I originally read a library copy of "Longitude" back when it was published in 1995. But I hankered for a copy of my own. Recently I discovered this new illustrated version of the original and must say that it's a real find. The pictures really do help one understand better the magnitude of William Harrison's breakthrough discovery about how to use a very accurate timepiece (now called a "chronometer") to determine longitude and help ships avoid the tragedy of becoming lost with potentially tragic consequences. The text is not so technical to put off a non-expert. I'm sure one could learn more about the workings of the chronometer, but I suspect a more detailed explanation might have put it beyond the comprehension of many of us.
The Man who Captured Time so Ships could Navigate AccuratelyJune 20, 2004 Stephen Pletko(London, Ontario, Canada) 14 out of 15 found this review helpful
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Note: This review has been written from a city with the following position on Earth:
This book contains the original 1995 "Longitude" text by Dava Sobel. In order to understand the significance of this text, the reader has to understand some words in this book's title and subtitle.
"Longitude" along with Latitude are two numbers along with their compass directions that are used to fix the position of anything on the planet Earth (as in the note above). Lines of Latitude are the imaginary, parallel, horizontal lines circling the Earth with the equator (fixed by nature) being the "zero-degree parallel of latitude." Lines of Longitude or "meridians" are the imaginary lines that run top to bottom (north to south), from the Earth's North Pole to its South Pole with the "prime meridian" (established by political means) being the "zero-degree meridian of longitude." (Since the mid-1880s, the prime meridian has passed through Greenwich, England. Before this time, the imaginary line that passed through a ship's home port was usually used as the zero-degree meridian.)
Finding latitude on land or sea is easy and eventually a device was invented to make it even more easier. But finding longitude, especially at sea on a swaying ship is difficult, a difficulty "that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history" and was "the greatest scientific problem" of the 1770s. Ways of determining longitude astronomically were devised, but these proved to be impractical when used at sea.
England's parliament recognized that "the longitude problem" had to be solved practically since many ships containing people and valuable cargo were lost at sea as soon as the ship's navigators lost sight of land. Thus, this parliament offered a top monetary prize that's equivalent to many millions of dollars today to anyone who could solve this problem.
Enter "a lone genius" named John Harrison (1693 to 1776). While most thought that the solution to this problem was astronomical, Harrison saw time as the solution.
To calculate the longitude using time on a ship at sea, you have to realize these two facts found in this book:
(i) The Earth takes 24 hours of time to spin 360 degrees on its axis from east to west.
(ii) Noon (12:00 PM) is the highest point the sun seems to "travel" in a day.
To learn one's longitude at sea using time, as the book explains, it's necessary to do the following:
(1) Know the time it is aboard ship. (Local noon was normally used because of fact (ii) above.)
(2) At the very same moment, know the time at a known longitude (such as at Greenwich, England).
(3) The difference in time between (1) and (2) is converted to a longitude reading in degrees and direction (using fact (i) above.)
So Harrison's solution was the determination of time of (2) above by inventing a precise timepiece. It would, in this case, be set to Greenwich time. (Note that, as stated, (1) could be determined using the noon-day sun but this was not always practical. Eventually, another timepiece was used to determine the ship's local noon for a particular day.) It should be realized that this was the "era of pendulum clocks" where, on a deck of a rocking ship, "such clocks would slow down, or speed up, or stop running altogether." Harrison was to capture time by building a marine clock or "timekeeper" (eventually called a "chronometer") that could be used on a ship at sea.
This book tells the "true story" of Harrison and his chronometers. (There were five built over a forty-year period. Harrison's first timekeeping device was known as H-1, his second was H-2, and so on.) Sobel uses accuracy (as evidenced by her many references) and extensive interviews with experts in the historical and marine navigational fields to create an engaging, mostly non-technical narrative to convey a story that's filled with suspense, heroism, perfectionism, and villiany. (She includes some essential technical detail of her description of Harrison's timekeepers.)
The nearly 180 illustrations chosen by William Andrewes compliment and add another dimension to Sobel's text. As Sobel explains: "Images of characters, events, instruments (especially [the exterior and interior] of Harrison's [timekeeping] contrivances), maps,and publications...illuminate the narrative. These pictures, paired with Will's detailed, [informative, and well-referenced] captions, offer up their own version of a swashbuckling, scientific adventure in the context of history and technology."
Finally, there is a good 1999 movie entitled "Longitude" that is based on this book's text. It makes all the illustrations in this book come alive.
In conclusion, this book's text and illustrations document the exciting story of how "a lone genius" solved "the longitude problem." Sobel states this more eloquently: "With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth...dimension to link points on a three-dimensional globe. He [took] the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked [or captured] the secret in a...watch."
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Excellent popular historyMarch 5, 1999 5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is an interesting, well-written popular history of the creation and development of the chronometer, which ultimately solved the longitude problem. The illustrated version of this book provides the pictures, drawings, and diagrams that were sorely needed in the original book by Dava Sobel. By the way, the inventor's name was JOHN Harrison, not William (as stated in the Amazon.com review) and not James (as stated in one of the reader reviews).
You Must see The HarwareNovember 28, 2000 Goings(Charlotteville, NY USA) 10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Spend a few extra bucks and get The Illustrated Longitude. It makes all the difference to see how those wonderful instruments looked. A fascinating tale, wonderfully enhanced by the illustrations, you'll love it!
The Origin of the Phase--Promise you the MoonApril 8, 2001 Conrad B. Senior(Easton, CT United States) 7 out of 9 found this review helpful
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A nicely illustrated, and short but a fascinating book on the story of finding a solution to the problem of establishing longitude at sea. Establishing latitude is relatively easy; one simply measures the angle the sun makes to the horizon. The problem of longitude eluded mankind for ages. In 1714, the British government posted a prize for the first man to develop an accurate and reliable means of establishing longitude at sea. This started one of the most important technological races in history. On one side were the astronomers who believed that the answer lay in the heavens. On the other one man who felt he could develop an accurate timepiece.
The author relates some of the horrify miscalculations that resulted in ships being unable to establish their positions accurately. In one example, Admiral Sir Clowdisly Shovell's fleet of five ships were returning from Gibraltar when four of his five ships struck the rocks of the Scilly Islands with a loss of over two thousand men. This was one of literally hundreds of horrifying instances, where ships were lost because they lacked information on their longitude. Then need for a mean of establishing longitude was critical.
Galileo found a method for determining longitude, using the Jovian moons that worked well on land, but not on the unsteady platform of a ship at sea. He did however, pave the way for astronomers that followed. These eventually found a way to find position based on the motions of the moon. This method was extremely complicated and time-consuming. The research for a means to find longitude using the Moon took longer than expected and ultimately proved to be impractical for use at sea.
In the meantime, a genius of a man, John Harrison, refined the timepiece, a method out of favor politically, because Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley dismissed this as a practical means. Unfortunately, the astronomers that followed continued to support this view.
Harrison single-handedly found a means of establishing Longitude by developing an accurate timepiece that could maintain it's accuracy and withstand the variations of temperature, humidity, and shock. This book is primarily about Harrison and his efforts to develop an accurate timepiece, which ultimately proved successful. Later other timepieces followed created by other men who perfected mass-production of these timepieces.
The story of Harrison is a magnificent triumph of a single man who stubbornly held fast to his beliefs and succeeded in accomplishing his goal in a lifetime.
If you are a navigator, and interested in celestial navigation this is a must read book. If you love history, you will love this book. A book worthy of a prominent place on your bookshelf.
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