Longitude - Dava Sobel

Tapping into the fabulously rich world of eighteenth century science & discovery, Longitude tells the tale of John Harrison, the self-taught clockmaker who devoted his life to building the perfect timepiece. One of the great puzzles of his day was how sailors could calculate longitude, which required them to know the local time plus the time in a certain location & to work out the difference between them. Harrison set himself to build a clock that was both accurate to an unheard-of degree, & unaffected by the rolling of the ocean or extremes of temperature. The result was a masterpice that revolutionised navigation & ...  Read the complete review

Do you know where John Harrison is buried? I do, because I’ve been to his grave, twice even, the last two times I was in London with students I booked a tour through Hampstead with London Walks and the guide showed us Harrison’s grave in the churchyard of St John’s Church. I see you frowning and scratching your heads: John Harrison? To be honest, when I saw the name on the tombstone, I didn’t know who that was, either, and when the guide mentioned that that man had solved the longitude problem, I wasn’t much wiser. The guide didn’t dwell on the subject and only after reading the book Longitude by Dana Sobel, I understood that I had paid homage to a genius. The ...  Read the complete review

First lets set things straight. Chronometer, the wondrous instrument which changed seafaring for ever is basically a pocket watch. It might have been a very accurate pocket watch for it’s time and undoubtedly the first John Harrison’s pocket chronometer was a work of genius but it is still only a clock. I am not trying to underestimate here the significance of its contribution to the history of navigation but it seems that esteem for the figure of Harrison as well as for the book about him got a bit out of hand. Dava Sovel is a good narrator. Her book starts with a clearly written and concise background to the longitude problem. This was the basic ...  Read the complete review