Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

If you are looking for the "science" behind the longitude problem and how it was solved, skip this book. If you're looking for the "drama" behind the longitude problem and how it was solved - then go ahead and buy this book.

Because this is not a science book. The author hardly describes how our hero John Harrison solves the problem of the longitude. Most of the pages are spent describing what our hero had to suffer through - to convince others that his invention was indeed the best solution available.

No graphs or pictures of the clock that our hero invented. No explanation of the inner workings of the fine inventions. Thats what made this book dissapointing for me... because I expected all that in the book.

For at least 10,000 years, sailors crossed every ocean with the same confident certainty as land explorers, and they did it
without compass, clock or undue confusion.

"We don't need no steenkin' longitude," might well be the attitude, to paraphrase a movie phrase.

Fishermen still do it. I've gone many times with such fishermen into the Sea of Cortez to net sharks. They don't use compas, radio, GPS or sextants; they simply point the prow of their "pungas" to a spot 50 or so miles offshore and after an hour or two arrive within half-a-mile-or-so of their nets.

So why does anyone need longitude?

The explosion of commerce at the time of Columbus resulted in vast new fleets of merchant and warships, and made sailors of men and boys who had never seen the sea. Instead of instinctive knowledge, they needed an entirely new and accurate system. The boom in trade produced a technological revolution in shipbuilding, and navigation had to keep up. All society was changing, as Adam Smith astutely noted in his study of "the wealth of nations."

This is where science, based on discrete observations to achieve results, comes into the picture. The "old" mariners were incredibly
skilled for their home waters. But the new ships were roaming the world for gold, glory and conquest. The best scientists of the era, from Galileo to Newton, tackled the navigation problem using the best science of their day. They all failed.

Think of the Biblical adage, "New bottles for new wine."

A new method, not just better old science, was needed. It is this story Sobel tells so well, of one man who found a new approach that worked beautifully and has lasted to this day. All it took was making a clock with an accuracy close to today's 99-cent quartz watches; all he had was metal, which varies greatly due to heat and fatigue. It's the story of genius unleashed, and the snobbish rejection of "the Establishment" when he succeeded. Sobel tells the story with skill and insight.

Similar motivations, jealousies, rivalries and competition exist to this day when people face new ideas. When you know what clockmaker John Harrison endured, you can sympathize with the frustration of modern innovators who are blocked by conservative dunderheads. Think of Henry Ford; had anyone asked in 1900, most people would have said society needed "a faster horse". Ford, like Harrison, thought different.

Many books, especially those which explain technology, have a short shelf life because of the impact of change. This book will be as fresh 100 years from now as it is today, because it explains the process of technological innovation rather than merely listing the results. It's worth reading again and again, just as a reminder of how blockheads deal with genius.

Sobel has written a book that explains how dunderheads do what they can, but genius does what it must.

Dava Sobel, like Simon Winchester or Canada's Pierre Berton, has clearly mastered the art of writing history in a form that is not only informative but, perhaps more important, is also compelling and entertaining.

In eighteenth century Europe, although scientists had long wrestled with the problem, sailors had no method of determining their longitude. The economic losses and the loss of life was so staggering that finding a solution to the problem was elevated to the almost legendary level of finding the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. In the Longitude Act of 1714, the British Parliament offered a prize of 20,000 pounds (equivalent to several million dollars today) to anyone who found a "practicable and useful" means of determining longitude.

One need look no further than the list of stellar minds that were applied to the problem (and failed to find the solution) - Tycho Brahe, Christian Huygens, Robert Cooke, Edmund Halley, Galileo and Vincenzo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren - to appreciate the almost insurmountable difficulty that this issue presented to the navigators of the day.

"Longitude" presents the story of John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker, who struggles alone to raise the art of clock making to unheard of levels of accuracy. The story of his ultimately receiving the prize from Britain's Board of Longitude is a dramatic, inspiring and heart-rending portrayal of 40 years of perseverance and struggle against political shenanigans and skullduggery as well as personal feuds, jealousy and outright espionage and sabotage.

From Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell's catastrophic loss of over 2000 lives when his fleet crashed at Land's End in 1707 to the refurbishment of Harrison's prize-winning chronometer for posterity in 1833, Dava Sobel has brought this small but important piece of the 18th century to life in a way that few other writers could manage. Two thumbs up for a thoroughly enjoyable piece of non-fiction writing!

Paul Weiss

I was on a cruise reading this book when the captain came by. He noticed it and complimented me on my selection - then went on and on about John Harrison. In the eighteenth century, the lack of a good Timex was a mortal problem for sailors. Without it, they couldn't tell longitude. The loss of ships and lives was a major financial drain for every seafaring country.

So important was this problem that the English Parliament created a special board authorizing R&D money for scientists working on the problem - and a HUGE reward for anyone's successful effort. Two methods were in contention - total celestial navigation versus a reliable timepiece. Unfortunately for Harrison, astronomical science was booming, mechanical arts were considered inferior, and the board was stacked against him. He still won the prize.

Harrison spent his whole life working on clocks. His innovations brought about huge improvements in timepieces at the same time that great strides were made in celestial navigation. In reading this account, I was struck with the serendipity factor that causes one scientist to be remembered over another. The young Charles Darwin was captivated by Humbolt's "Personal Narrative," a 2,000 page memoir of his voyage around South America. Darwin jumped at the chance to live out this dream when offered a spot on the Beagle. He later wrote to Humbolt, "My whole course of life is due to having read and reread as a youth, this personal narrative."

Newton dealt with gravity, planetary motion, physics, and calculus. Maxwell discovered electromagnetic fields. Madame Curie made significant discoveries about radiation. Bohr and Schrodinger developed quantum theory. Each of these scientists is likely to have a story like Darwin's. The story in this book suggests they probably didn't work any harder or less intelligently than Harrison, yet they are all much better known. What they (perhaps) accidentally spent their lives studying, for whatever reason, was deemed more worthy of renown than the making of a reliable timepiece.

Anyway, this is a very enjoyable read about a remarkable man who created the first timepiece that would work at sea - solving one of the most serious scientific problems of his generation.

I would not go so far as to say I hated history in school, but it was far from my favorite subject. As I read Longitude I found myself wanting to search out more information and explore the people and science on my own. Heck, if Dava Sobel had been writing our text books, I might have been a history major. I would reccommend Longitude to any and everyone - the budding history scholar, the salty old sailor, the astronomy buff or the normal joe looking for a good read. The science is approachable, the history intriguing and the story of Harrison's drive and determination inspiring. I would especially reccommend the edition with the plates showing the actual clocks/watches built by Harrison.