Longitude

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the globe'' in a series of concentric circles that are smaller the farther they are from the equator. A day's worth of those bits and pieces would eventually add up to the only quantity that meant anything at all to him: time. Sobel follows the story of the man who cracked it, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire named John Harrison. Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version. Sobel does this by charting the connections between Harrison and luminary contemporaries, including Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Christopher Wren.

He/the Board adopted unscrupulous methods to thwart Harrison: sabotage, backstabbing, and theft of intellectual property. Yet the clarity of a mind that could dream up the escapement mechanism, among other novel clock parts, was not reflected in his ability to express himself.

But for centuries, where to set 0° longitude was a political selection, so it had bounced around from the Canary Islands (Ptolemy's choice) to Rome to Jerusalem and to many more locations.

Si tenemos en cuenta que circunvalar la Tierra supone 360º, que se dividen en 24 meridianos de longitud, obtenemos una separación entre ellos de 15º, calculándose cada grado en minutos. This elegant chronometer with its pretty detailing had been miniaturized down to a diameter of 5 inches. I’m not sure how to describe how lost you could be, out there on the ocean, no longer in sight of shore. Anyone could determine that he was on the tropic of cancer, but determining how far along the tropic of cancer was a different challenge--one that, if solved, would revolutionize navigation and save countless lives.As I explained above, the general solution to calculating longitude was long in evidence, but no one could think of a way to effect it. The recipe for sales success in international book sales rarely contains such unpromising ingredients as these – an obsessive carpenter’s son from Yorkshire, an intractable navigational problem and a lot of clocks. A well-timed bomb, exploding 6,440 feet in the air (the limit of available technology), could be seen from a distance of 100 miles. An extraordinary tale of political intrigue and academic back-biting, of intellectual brilliance, and mechanical genius, of heroic endeavours and downright dishonesty … a superb achievement.

this book presents the stories of the development of more and more accurate time pieces, alternative celestial positioning methods that were useless if overcast, and deciding and agreeing on where the standard time for comparison (today's Greenwich Mean Time) should be. Sure, the concept of sectioning off the world by concentric lines of latitude (running east-west) and longitude (aligned by the poles) had existed as early as 300 B. Background: Latitude lines are the parallel lines that circle the globe above and below the equator, and any sailor could figure out his latitude by measuring the length of the day or looking at the angle of the sun or the north star. Longitude from Dava Sobel is a fascinating account of how a virtually unknown watchmaker named John Harrison conquered one of the oldest and thorniest problems surrounding the ocean voyages - the problem of accurately measuring longitude -, which stumped even the best of scientific minds for centuries. Moreover, it turns out that despite the oceans are vast, it was easy to ambush ships because most followed narrow routes to avoid confusion.Even less promising were crackpot suggestions like taking along on shipboard a wounded dog that would presumably yelp on cue whenever someone at home would dip a cloth soaked with its blood in a solution of the miraculous ''powder of sympathy. At that time astronomy was seen as the best route to a solution despite being time consuming and difficult.

There are biographical articles on all the major characters added; boxed information on the important scientific, nautical, historical and artistic background to the extraordinary story, time lines, and diagrams to explain the geography, horology and astrology of the Longitude problem.Anyone alive in the 18th century would have known that ‘the longitude problem’ was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day – and had been for centuries. As I turned the pages, I marveled at the intricacies of clockmaking and the profound impact Harrison's chronometers had on navigation.