My kingdom for a clock!
Long before the days of ubiquitous GPS devices, when sailors first started voyaging to distant parts of the world, it was very difficult to determine just exactly where one was. While latitude could be determined by measuring the height of the midday sun above the horizon, longitude was quite a bit trickier. Without an accurate determination of longitude, ships could not only get lost aimlessly at sea but also wrecked on the shorelines of unforeseen islands and continents. This was such a costly and frustrating problem that in the early 18th century, England, the world’s leading maritime power, established a Board of Longitude to encourage efforts to find a solution to the longitude puzzle. The Board promised a large cash prize to whomever could come up with a reliable and accurate method for determining longitude. The book entitled Longitude by science writer Dava Sobel, published in 1995, recounts the story of the long and arduous quest to solve the longitude problem and claim the prize.
The surest method for finding longitude is to compare the solar time (noon, for example, the point when the sun is highest in the sky) of a known point (usually the port of departure) with that of your present location. Just as modern time zones tell us that New York is roughly an hour ahead of Chicago, the difference in minutes and seconds between point A and point B can be converted to a measurement of degrees indicating how far east or west you’ve traveled. The only way it is possible to measure this, however, is if you have an accurate timepiece that can remain synchronized to the exact solar time of your home port. Up to the early 1700s, this was not possible because there weren’t any clocks that could keep sufficiently accurate time when subjected to shipboard motion and temperature changes. What was needed was something we take for granted these days: a reliable timepiece. An English carpenter and self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison (1693–1776) set about to create such a marine chronometer that could withstand seaborne conditions and allow for accurate and reliable navigation. Harrison would end up devoting decades of his life to the project.
Longitude was a New York Times bestseller and won several prestigious book awards. It is deliberately written for an audience of general readers, perhaps too deliberately at times. This is a very small and short book that one can read in a day or two. It’s written at about a high school vocabulary level. Wherever possible, complex scientific concepts are explained in layman’s terms, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. Longitude is at its best when it’s discussing the biography of Harrison and all of the politics behind the awarding of the coveted prize. It’s not so great, however, at explaining how exactly geographical coordinates are measured or what mechanical advancements made Harrison’s clocks so special. In the interest of simplification, such topics are glossed over in a sentence or two so as not to strain the brains of casual readers. Some simple black and white diagrams might have been helpful, but the book has no illustrations. Perhaps such diagrams would intimidate prospective readers by being too “sciency.” The result of too much popularizing is that the science and mathematics behind this story get inadequate and what feels like half-baked coverage. This is science history that succeeds as history; it’s about scientists but not so much about science.
The story of John Harrison is really fascinating, and this book made me want to learn more. Longitude is much like a National Geographic article (albeit a long one). You know you’re not getting quite the full story because the account has been condensed for reasons of space and accessibility. Nevertheless, you still learn a lot, enough to satisfy most curious general readers and pique the interest of those willing to pursue the subject further.