Sobel: The Illustrated Longitude
From Scienticity
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Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrewes, The Illustrated Longitude. New York : Walker and Company, 1998. 216 pages; copiously illustrated.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century race to solve "the longitude problem" -- how to determine a ship's longitude at sea with sufficient precision, to within half a degree or two minutes of time -- was a high-stakes and no-holds-barred competition between those who favored an astronomical solution and those convinced that improvements in timekeeping would save the day. King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675, hoping it would solve the problem. In 1714 the British Government offered a prize of £20,000 for a solution. While treasure ships foundered at sea, political and scientific intrigue abounded on land.
The problem was finally conquered by John Harrison, who made unprecedented improvements in the precision and robustness of mechanical clocks, spending most of his life in dogged determination to do so. In the end, he won the race but was cheated of the prize.
Dava Sobel has chosen to tell the history of solving the Longitude Problem as the heroic struggle of a lone inventor -- Harrison -- against a system stacked against him. There's much more to the story than that, but it's a valid viewpoint and she makes it into a romantic and visionary tale without distorting the facts. I gave her low marks for "scienticity" not because of inaccuracies, but because she missed so many opportunities to provide a deeper scientific understanding that a few words would have provided.
It is worth reading and highly readable, and the only single reference on the subject. I read a large-format edition to which co-author William Andrewes had added copious illustrations; earlier editions contained the text only, and are still available under the title Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. The illustrations in this edition avoided being merely gratuitous; along with their captions, they added a significant additional thread of storytelling to the text.
-- Notes by JNS
