List Books » Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Authors: Dava Sobel, Neil Armstrong
ISBN-13: 9780802714626, ISBN-10: 0802714625
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Walker & Company
Date Published: October 2005
Edition: 10th Anniversary Edition
Dava Sobel is the bestselling author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter, and The Planets, coauthor of The Illustrated Longitude, and editor of Letters to Father. She lives in East Hampton, New York.
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day and had been for centuries.The quest for a solution has occupied scientists for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, England's Parliament upped the ante by offering a king's ransom to anyone whose method or device proved successful. One man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.LONGITUDE is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest, and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking. Through Dava Sobel's consummate skill, LONGITUDE opens many new windows on our world."The marine chronometer is a glorious and fascinating...
This is a gem of a book.
Acknowledgments | vii | |
1. | Imaginary Lines | 1 |
2. | The Sea Before Time | 11 |
3. | Adrift in a Clockwork Universe | 21 |
4. | Time in a Bottle | 34 |
5. | Powder of Sympathy | 41 |
6. | The Prize | 51 |
7. | Cogmaker's Journal | 61 |
8. | The Grasshopper Goes to Sea | 74 |
9. | Hands on Heaven's Clock | 88 |
10. | The Diamond Timekeeper | 100 |
11. | Trial by Fire and Water | 111 |
12. | A Tale of Two Portraits | 126 |
13. | The Second Voyage of Captain James Cook | 138 |
14. | The Mass Production of Genius | 152 |
15. | In the Meridian Courtyard | 165 |
Sources | 177 | |
Index | 181 |