Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest… (1995)

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"When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. --Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi"

Author Dava Sobel begins each chapter with a literary quote -- a sign that she knows how to make science and history palatable to a casual reader like me. Actually I found this book so engrossing it was hard to put down.

Not being able to accurately measure longitude put seagoing vessels in grave peril of crashing or being stranded at sea. So serious was the problem that in 1714 the British Parliament offered a king's ransom for a solution.

English clockmaker John Harrison (1693-1776), a self-taught genius, was obsessed with solving the longitude problem with a clock that would keep accurate time at sea. For forty years he devoted his life to creating his chronometer. The scientific elite favored an astronomical solution over a mechanical one.

This is a suspenseful history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking -- a true story of obsession, intrigue, and the common man against the establishment -- and a beautifully written "gem of a book".

The elegant small sized paperback (which I found at Goodwill) has French fold covers and full color plates.

Around the year in 52 books challenge notes:
#21. A book related to Maximilian Hell, the noted astronomer and Jesuit Priest who was born in 1720 ( )

Interesting read but felt like should have been an article rather than a book. ( )

I found this so boring. I thought I would like it ( )

Dava Sobel's popular history Longitude is in a difficult position, because the reader wants to know more about John Harrison and his trials, but Sobel's dry writing probably wouldn't maintain interest in a longer book. The book does very well to set out its stall; we take for granted the ability to keep time accurately nowadays, unaware of its "contentious history" (pg. 164), but Sobel shows us just how difficult – nay, impossible – it was to keep time and, in navigation, to establish longitude accurately, in a world before Harrison's ingenuity came along. Educating the general reader on why this was such a problem, without turning us every which way with maths and maps and geometry, can be counted a success for Sobel.

The problem of establishing longitude offered two potential solutions: the mechanical one pioneered by Harrison, which eventually succeeded, and the lunar one, favoured by many of the influential brains of the time. Again, Sobel is good at linking the timekeeping story to the world of astronomy: the 'clockwork universe' by which people speculated one could keep time and establish longitude by observing the position of the Moon, or the relative positions of Jupiter's moons. Though Harrison's solution ultimately proved more practical (and precise), the various lunar methods were not as silly as they might retrospectively appear (we use satellites for GPS, for example), and it led to other scientific breakthroughs, such as discovering that light had a velocity (pg. 29).

Where the book proved something of a disappointment was regarding John Harrison himself; frankly, I wanted more – felt I needed more. His is the great achievement, one of those rare individuals humanity is occasionally blessed with who move the human race forward when no one else can, and Sobel sometimes struggles to convey the magnitude of his achievement. She does well enough, but the reader has to pause and ponder to really weigh Harrison's impact, doing the work themselves rather than have it delivered to them by Sobel.

Similarly, I felt Harrison's personal story deserved more attention. He was a low-born, self-taught "country bumpkin" (pg. 72) who shifted humanity forward, working painstakingly on his task for decades, and who ultimately saw himself treated shabbily by the blue-blooded establishment, who favoured the lunar method over the mechanical one. I expected more on how he pursued his task (the twenty-year gap between his second major clock and his all-important third is dealt with in the space of a page) and also on the political rivalries which hindered him when it came to collecting the £20,000 reward offered by Parliament for solving the longitude problem. We get little sense of his personality: when Sobel writes that Harrison "forswore Shakespeare" in his house (pg. 64), she does not elaborate on why.

Ultimately, Longitude is a fascinating if flawed account of an important chapter of mankind, a time when much intellectual effort was spent on mastering a critical scientific conundrum and one man provided the breakthrough. John Harrison is not unknown nowadays, but he is perhaps not as well known as he should be (if you're not a history buff and the name sounds familiar, it might only be because an auctioned Harrison watch makes Del Boy and Rodney into millionaires on Only Fools and Horses). Sobel's book is a success, in that we become more aware of the difficult history and don't take the scientific advances for granted, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking for a little more colour. ( )