Customer Reviews

The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having bought and read "Longitude", the only lightly illustrated original hardback version, I wanted to know more about how the actual clocks worked, and I wanted to see them, without making a trans-Atlantic pilgrimage to Greenwich.

Hence, when I saw an illustrated version of "Longitude", I had to buy it. This book contains the original text, with no additions, except for the illustrations. The photographs are beautifully done, as is the printing.

My only hesitation in not awarding the book five stars is that I was hoping for one of two things; either an illustrated version of the original, with a couple of pictures of each chronometer, at a reasonable price, or a more detailed illustrated version, with more information on how the chronometers actually work. What we ended up with is a compromise. Beautiful pictures of the chronometers, but little extra detail of Harrison's marvelous inventions.

Still, an improvement on the original, which is an excellent book, one I have read several times. Highly recommended.

By the way, when I purchased this book, I donated my original version to the library.

So as not to repeat myself and try the patience of those customers who have already read "Longitude", I will confine my comments to the additional material in the illustrated version. If you haven't read "Longitude", it's a great little book, and I refer you to reviews by myself and others on that book's page.

"The Illustrated Longitude" contains the entire original text of Dava Sobel's book, "Longitude", along with 178 illustrations provided by William J. H. Andrewes. Mr. Andrewes hosted the Longitude Symposium that inspired Dava Sobel's book and has himself published the annotated proceedings of the Symposium in his book entitled "The Quest for Longitude". The illustrations in this book consist of portraits of people and photographs of documents and instruments which are referenced in the text. The documents include maps, journals, pages of books, and official decrees. Nearly every major player in the Longitude drama is represented with at least one portrait. Most fascinating are the photographs of the time pieces, themselves. I found the illustrations to be only mildly interesting until I got to the discussion of John Harrison's longitude clocks. At this point, I was astonished to see how grand and beautiful H-1 was...and still is, and how small and elegant H-4 is in contrast. I found it difficult to picture Harrison's clocks while reading Dava Sobel's book, and the ability to see them in this illustrated version has left me even more impressed with Mr. Harrison's work. All of Harrison's clocks are represented with large color photographs, and many of the later copies of his works by Larcum Kendall, Thomas Mudge, John Arnold, and Thomas Earnshaw are also pictured. I wish there were more illustrations addressing the workings of Harrison's clocks, but that's probably a subject for another book. I recommend "The Illustrated Longitude" to fans of John Harrison's work and early chronometers who will not have the opportunity to see these incredible instruments in person.

I originally read a library copy of "Longitude" back when it was published in 1995. But I hankered for a copy of my own. Recently I discovered this new illustrated version of the original and must say that it's a real find. The pictures really do help one understand better the magnitude of William Harrison's breakthrough discovery about how to use a very accurate timepiece (now called a "chronometer") to determine longitude and help ships avoid the tragedy of becoming lost with potentially tragic consequences. The text is not so technical to put off a non-expert. I'm sure one could learn more about the workings of the chronometer, but I suspect a more detailed explanation might have put it beyond the comprehension of many of us.

+++++

Note: This review has been written from a city with the following position on Earth:

LATITUDE: (43 degrees 2 minutes North)
LONGITUDE: (81 degrees 9 minutes West.)

This book contains the original 1995 "Longitude" text by Dava Sobel. In order to understand the significance of this text, the reader has to understand some words in this book's title and subtitle.

"Longitude" along with Latitude are two numbers along with their compass directions that are used to fix the position of anything on the planet Earth (as in the note above). Lines of Latitude are the imaginary, parallel, horizontal lines circling the Earth with the equator (fixed by nature) being the "zero-degree parallel of latitude." Lines of Longitude or "meridians" are the imaginary lines that run top to bottom (north to south), from the Earth's North Pole to its South Pole with the "prime meridian" (established by political means) being the "zero-degree meridian of longitude." (Since the mid-1880s, the prime meridian has passed through Greenwich, England. Before this time, the imaginary line that passed through a ship's home port was usually used as the zero-degree meridian.)

Finding latitude on land or sea is easy and eventually a device was invented to make it even more easier. But finding longitude, especially at sea on a swaying ship is difficult, a difficulty "that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history" and was "the greatest scientific problem" of the 1770s. Ways of determining longitude astronomically were devised, but these proved to be impractical when used at sea.

England's parliament recognized that "the longitude problem" had to be solved practically since many ships containing people and valuable cargo were lost at sea as soon as the ship's navigators lost sight of land. Thus, this parliament offered a top monetary prize that's equivalent to many millions of dollars today to anyone who could solve this problem.

Enter "a lone genius" named John Harrison (1693 to 1776). While most thought that the solution to this problem was astronomical, Harrison saw time as the solution.

To calculate the longitude using time on a ship at sea, you have to realize these two facts found in this book:

(i) The Earth takes 24 hours of time to spin 360 degrees on its axis from east to west.
(ii) Noon (12:00 PM) is the highest point the sun seems to "travel" in a day.

To learn one's longitude at sea using time, as the book explains, it's necessary to do the following:

(1) Know the time it is aboard ship. (Local noon was normally used because of fact (ii) above.)
(2) At the very same moment, know the time at a known longitude (such as at Greenwich, England).
(3) The difference in time between (1) and (2) is converted to a longitude reading in degrees and direction (using fact (i) above.)

So Harrison's solution was the determination of time of (2) above by inventing a precise timepiece. It would, in this case, be set to Greenwich time. (Note that, as stated, (1) could be determined using the noon-day sun but this was not always practical. Eventually, another timepiece was used to determine the ship's local noon for a particular day.) It should be realized that this was the "era of pendulum clocks" where, on a deck of a rocking ship, "such clocks would slow down, or speed up, or stop running altogether." Harrison was to capture time by building a marine clock or "timekeeper" (eventually called a "chronometer") that could be used on a ship at sea.

This book tells the "true story" of Harrison and his chronometers. (There were five built over a forty-year period. Harrison's first timekeeping device was known as H-1, his second was H-2, and so on.) Sobel uses accuracy (as evidenced by her many references) and extensive interviews with experts in the historical and marine navigational fields to create an engaging, mostly non-technical narrative to convey a story that's filled with suspense, heroism, perfectionism, and villiany. (She includes some essential technical detail of her description of Harrison's timekeepers.)

The nearly 180 illustrations chosen by William Andrewes compliment and add another dimension to Sobel's text. As Sobel explains: "Images of characters, events, instruments (especially [the exterior and interior] of Harrison's [timekeeping] contrivances), maps,and publications...illuminate the narrative. These pictures, paired with Will's detailed, [informative, and well-referenced] captions, offer up their own version of a swashbuckling, scientific adventure in the context of history and technology."

Finally, there is a good 1999 movie entitled "Longitude" that is based on this book's text. It makes all the illustrations in this book come alive.

In conclusion, this book's text and illustrations document the exciting story of how "a lone genius" solved "the longitude problem." Sobel states this more eloquently: "With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth...dimension to link points on a three-dimensional globe. He [took] the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked [or captured] the secret in a...watch."

+++++

"The Illustrated Longitude" is an fast moving historical account of John Harrison's progression as an instrument maker and the legitimate finder of a practical solution to the problem of determining Longitude at Sea.

If you are at all interested in the antecedents of today's accurate timekeeping devices, this book is a must. The print quality is very high and the illustrations a wonderful aid to picturing the story unfold. The book does not contain detailed plans of Mr Harrison's chronometers or description of the techniques of celestial navigation, but rather is a brisk, engagingly written account of the origin of the Longitude problem, Mr Harrison's solution and those of his rivals and the political intrigues which delayed full acknowledgement of the merit of his devices.

I bought this book some months after visiting the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. The ingenious mechanisms at work can keep an observer enthralled for hours. "The Illustrated Longitude" really conveys the significance of the Longitude problem in that era and the career details and challenges overcome by a very clever and self made man.

John Harrison completed his first pendulum clock in 1713 before the age of 20. He made the gears for this out of wood which was radical for such a use, but as a carpenter, perhaps not to him---which is a mark of genius, I'd say; to reach beyond accepted norms in this manner. This he did after borrowing a book on math and the laws of motion; which he copied word for word, making his own copy. He incorporated different varieties of wood into his clock for strenth and later invented a bi-metal pendulum to counteract the expansion and compression of various individual metals. He also employed friction-free movements so as to do away with problematic lubricants. When intrigued by the puzzle of time at sea and the issue of longitude he contemplated substituting something not prone to gravity, as a pendulum of course is, to track times passing. In 1737 he created a cantilevered clock 4 foot square. The longitude board (which had offered a cash bonus to anyone who could devise a method in which time at sea could be kept) admired this creation of Harrison's. Four years later he returned with an improved model; then he started on a 3rd model, like the previous two, also a fairly large sized clock. But there exists a problem within this book: An artisan freemason by the name of John Jefferys at the Worshipful Company of clockmakers befriended Harrison and then later presented to him a pocket watch in 1753. Then in 1755, while still working on his 3rd model, Harrison says this to the Longitude board: I have..."good reason to think" on the basis of a watch "already executed that such small machines [he's referring to pocketwatches] may be of great service with respect to longitude." He then completed version 3 in 1759. His fourth version appears just a year later, however, and is a 5 inch wide pocketwatch! The obvious inference made by the author is that after he received the pocketwatch from Jeffreys he seemingly put his version #3 on the backburner and soon started on the pocketwatch 4th version. The author does not claim Harrison copied anything from the Jeffreys model, but she certainly phrases this section so as to lend one to believe that this may have been the case; that Jefferys had a hand in the masterstroke invention Harrison eventually produced in version #4. This is not true. Harrison commissioned the watch he received from Jeffreys and was based on Harrison's specifications. It seems that Harrison simply asked Jeffreys to test an idea which he himself hadn't the time to attack just then; as he was still working on his 3rd version of a table-top prototype clock. Hence Harrison's above statement to the board in 1755 whence his ideas were validated by Jeffreys. In addition, the author plays up the part of the Astronomer Royal's part in attempting to impede Harrison from convincing the longitiude board of the efficacy of a time-piece solution to this problem over a celestial answer to this conundrum. The author also jazzes up the issue of whether Harrison received the prize the board promised to pay for a successful solution herein; even though the board supported him for upwards of 20 years as he pursued this quest. It's as if the author intentionally omitted some facts (that the Jefferys was a Harrison commission), and pumped up others (of a rival/foil on the board trying to impede Harrison and the compensation issue; implying that Harrison was jipped) just to make the story more compelling. John Harrison's story, however, is extremely compelling as it is and didn't need this extra spice served up by the author.Do read this (very short) book on how this Mr. Harrison solved the problem of knowing where one is when at sea; and if you're in London, visit the Old Royal Observatory and the Clockmakers museum (in the Guildhall) where you can see Harrison's wonderful creations in person. Enjoy!

This is an interesting, well-written popular history of the creation and development of the chronometer, which ultimately solved the longitude problem. The illustrated version of this book provides the pictures, drawings, and diagrams that were sorely needed in the original book by Dava Sobel. By the way, the inventor's name was JOHN Harrison, not William (as stated in the Amazon.com review) and not James (as stated in one of the reader reviews).

Spend a few extra bucks and get The Illustrated Longitude. It makes all the difference to see how those wonderful instruments looked. A fascinating tale, wonderfully enhanced by the illustrations, you'll love it!

A great read for people who are not scientists but love history (and are bound by time and want to know who to blame!) Some excellent photos. and diagrams.

I must say I ordered this book because of a review I read, not because I knew Dava Sobel's work or knew the least about clockmaking or sailing. Harrison's ingenuity, the times in which he lived, and the importance of his quest were more appealing to me, and I was not dissapointed. By all this I mean you need not be a sailor or anything to enjoy this fascinating and beautifully illustrated story. (A nice touch of sophistication for the coffee table as well, if you excuse the shallowness of such remark)