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bookish1ifedeb 's review for:
I started this before Christmas, set it aside, and finally returned to it two days ago, to whip through it quickly. This enjoyable account of the invention of the chronometer, a clock designed to keep time accurately at sea, details the search for an accurate way to determine longitude at sea. It is also a wonderful story about a dedicated self-taught clockmaker, John Harrison, whose background in carpentry (and prone to seasickness) hardly suggested he might solve a problem that had caused countless ships to be lost at sea, foundered on reefs and coastlines over centuries of seafaring history, all for want of a way to determine longitude.
Harrison undertook the problem of how to keep time aboard ships before England's Parliament offered a rich prize for inventing a way to chart a ship's longitude. Having built his first pendulum clock in 1713 at age twenty, Harrison carried on his clockmaking over some forty years, building five now-storied clock designs, including H-5 or "The Watch," as it became known. His remarkable achievement was tainted by political maneuvers and the disdain of the astronomy community, who favored a complex method based on charting the movement of the moon against the stars--many of those astronomers sitting on the Board of Longitude, the group appointed to award the prize. Harrison's struggle to prove his device and win the prize spanned most of his life. But his chronometer and the later evolutions based on Harrison's Watch replaced the lunar method and became the accepted way to determine longitude--arguably enabling Britain to rule the seven seas and establish its global empire.
Author Dava Sobel (sometimes poetically) tells the tale of longitude, peopled with scientific luminaries, explorers, seamen and crowned heads, and details Harrison's trials in trying to win his deserved acclaim. Highly recommended.
Harrison undertook the problem of how to keep time aboard ships before England's Parliament offered a rich prize for inventing a way to chart a ship's longitude. Having built his first pendulum clock in 1713 at age twenty, Harrison carried on his clockmaking over some forty years, building five now-storied clock designs, including H-5 or "The Watch," as it became known. His remarkable achievement was tainted by political maneuvers and the disdain of the astronomy community, who favored a complex method based on charting the movement of the moon against the stars--many of those astronomers sitting on the Board of Longitude, the group appointed to award the prize. Harrison's struggle to prove his device and win the prize spanned most of his life. But his chronometer and the later evolutions based on Harrison's Watch replaced the lunar method and became the accepted way to determine longitude--arguably enabling Britain to rule the seven seas and establish its global empire.
Author Dava Sobel (sometimes poetically) tells the tale of longitude, peopled with scientific luminaries, explorers, seamen and crowned heads, and details Harrison's trials in trying to win his deserved acclaim. Highly recommended.