Longitude
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Longitude
Dava Sobel
Science & Nature
James Mustich
Aug 11, 2018
On the night of October 22, 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s fleet, returning home from Gibraltar, was wrecked on the Scilly Isles, only twenty miles off the southwest tip of England. The souls of these two thousand lost sailors, as Dava Sobel elegantly puts it, precipitated (with all the speed a government can muster) the famed Longitude Act of 1714, in which Parliament promised a prize of £20,000 (well over ten million dollars in today’s currency) for a comprehensive solution to the longitude problem, which, simply put, was this: How do you know where you are once you’ve lost sight of land? Sobel’s narrative of John Harrison’s forty years of struggle to improve his invention (the chronometer) and to claim the prize, which George III finally awarded him in 1773, is a fine and fascinating journey.
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James O'Doherty
Feb 23, 2019
History as adventure. Inspiring story of one man's obsession
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