Longitude - The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time ***

by Dava Sobel

1995 Walker Publishing Company

The title of the book is a little misleading, but it's still a good book. It makes it sound like the inventor invented Longitude. He didn't - he just solved the problem of how to figure out longitude. In fact, he didn't even really figure it out. They already knew how to figure out longitude.

The globe, being circular in shape is divided into 360 degrees of longitude. Every one degree of longitude represents a certain distance (15 or 30 miles for example). The way to figure out how many degrees you traveled is by using the time of where you departed from compared to the time of where a ship is located in that exact moment. So they knew how to do it! The problem was that they needed to keep the departure time current and accurate so the comparison could be calculated accurately. Well 300 years ago, time keepers (watches) were not able to withstand the trials of sea travel - the extreme heat and cold, the movement of the boat and the constant wet conditions. So really, this book is the story of how this inventor created a watch that was extremely accurate an durable. He was an innovator of clock mechanics - not the inventor of longitude.

Of course his accurate clocks enabled sailors to calculate Longitude, so he did solve the problem of longitude.

An interesting theme in the book is that this longitude problem was rife with politics. The longitude problem was so important (and deemed almost impossible to solve at the time) that the King of England offered an award for the person who could solve this problem. Well, many people tried and what it amounted to was that there were two different strains of logic. The king had set up a board to help solve the problem and judge the solutions that came in. The memebers of the board were of course all scientists and mathematicians, and they were not eager to endorse a mechanical solution by a mere clockmaker. They were more interested in astronomical and scientific ways to figure it out. There was much resistance to the time pieces and therefore, it took the clockmaker over 20 years to convince this board that his time keepers were the solution.

There are some other minor points that are interesting, such as how they picked the Prime Meridian, but the above summary, pretty much gets to the gist of the story.

The book is easy to read (relatively - some of the older women in the Chicago Pubic Library were not able to get through it) and tells some good anecdotes and tales.