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

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A most wonderful book that has resided on my shelves since January of 1996. Sobel is a master of getting her research correct. And an absolute gem of a storyteller! She has a way of bringing history to life that few can match, and none exceed. Galileo’s Daughter, and The Glass Universe are also great reads.

Longitude Illustrated Edition by Dava Sobel | Goodreads Longitude Illustrated Edition by Dava Sobel | Goodreads

Podcast of Dava Sobel discussing The Origins of Longitude at the Shanghai International Literary Festival John Harrison was a genius of his times; beside the fact that he produced the first accurate marine watches for calculating longitude, his pieces are works of art: the hour difference into a geographical separation,'' Ms. Sobel writes, since one hour of difference in time equals 15 degrees of longitude separation. I take GPS for granted. I don’t use it that much personally, because I don’t tend to go anywhere, but I’m sure all this technology I love to use makes use of GPS. Thanks to GPS, we can forget that calculating longitude without the help of a network of satellites is difficult and requires great mathematical and engineering expertise. GPS might not be great at giving directions, but that doesn’t mean you’re lost.

Really lovely and very interesting reading. Everybody knows about longitude but I guess not so many know the struggles and fights behind the tries to 'conquer' it, including myself. the globe'' in a series of concentric circles that are smaller the farther they are from the equator.

Longitude By Dava Sobel - Fratello Watches 【F】 Book Review: Longitude By Dava Sobel - Fratello Watches

Longitude: Millennium Edition The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Dava Sobel is an accomplished writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Ms. Sobel attended Antioch College and the City College of New York before receiving her bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002. Arthritis: What Works; Revolutionary Healing Approaches From An Unprecedented Nationwide Survey Of People With Arthritis. St. Martin's Press. 1992.Without longitudinal calculations, many ships became lost. During long voyages, calculating one's distance became nearly impossible to gauge with serious accuracy. Discovering the "secret of the longitude" was therefore a great goal for any ship's captain and for any country with business, military or commercial, on the high seas. The British legislature set up a Board of Longitude which had the authority to offer an award to anyone who could solve the problem. The book is about John Harrison's long, bedeviled question to built an incredibly accurate time-piece that could resist the vagaries of the sea. Fellows nominated in 2022". APS Fellows archive. American Physical Society . Retrieved October 19, 2022. It was Ptolemy in ‘ Geographia’, written in the 2nd century, who contributed the concept of a co-ordinate system based on the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude, for accurately plotting any spot on the surface of earth. With these imaginary lines he bought a new light in to the maritime explorations and map-making methods of his time. The sailors while at the ocean found it pretty straightforward to find their current latitude - which is drawn parallel to each other while girdling the globe – by measuring the height of the sun or any known celestial bodies. The inability to solve the longitude problem for so long also had dire consequences. If a ship didn't know how far to the east or west it had traveled, then it didn't know where land was likely to be, and the unexpected contiguity of land had