Longitude
The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel
The recap
For centuries, sailors could work out their latitude from the sun and stars, but judging how far east or west they had traveled was guesswork, and bad guesses wrecked ships and cost countless lives. In 1714 the British Parliament offered a fortune to anyone who could solve the problem. The scientific establishment assumed the answer lay in the heavens, in charting the moon's motion against the stars. John Harrison, a self-taught carpenter turned clockmaker from rural England, bet instead on building a timepiece accurate enough to keep time aboard a pitching, salty ship as temperatures swung from frost to tropical heat. Dava Sobel's slim book follows his decades of patient invention and his long, bruising struggle with the astronomers and officials who controlled the prize. Along the way she explains, with real clarity, why time and place are inseparable at sea. It is a compact story of ingenuity, stubbornness and institutional snobbery that turns a technical puzzle into a human drama.
Why read it
For history buffs, tinkerers and anyone who roots for the underdog, delivered as a short, brisk read.
Fun facts
- 01
The book grew out of a 1993 symposium on the longitude problem held at Harvard University, which Sobel attended as a science journalist.
- 02
It became an international bestseller and was translated into about two dozen languages.
- 03
Longitude won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award and was named Book of the Year in England.
- 04
In 2000 it became a TV drama written and directed by Charles Sturridge, with Michael Gambon as John Harrison and Jeremy Irons as the horologist Rupert Gould.
