Customer Reviews

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

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If you can't get Newton and Galileo to solve your scientific problems, who do you turn to? Well the English government turned to everyone, hoping that some budding scientist could figure out the problem of calculating Longitude at sea. They even offered a huge reward. Why was it important? Without precise longitude, there was no way to steer a ship with any precision. Thus English ships were being wrecked and precious cargo wasn't making its scheduled delivery.

The scientists worked and worked on the problem. Many men including Edmund Halley thought that by mapping the stars, one could use the night sky as a map at sea. Although he knew little about science, a simple clockmaker named John Harrison thought that well-built clock with a dual face would solve the problem. You get to guess which person was right.

Longitude is both a vibrant story of the pains of solving an important problem, and a biography of the man who solved it. I don't tend to read the subject of science all that much, because I find it dry, but not so with this book. Author Dava Sobel lends an understanding of the human element in science. That Harrison has to fight snobbery first and later jealousy demonstrates how ego and self-importance can get in the way of the most important problems facing human beings. Not only will you learn how average people can solve enormous tasks, but you'll nod as the familiar self-promoters try to take the credit.

This is a highly readable little book, and I recommend it, with a few caveats.

Sobel presents her material logically and lucidly. She is a good prose stylist and is obviously an accomplished reporter. This book, however, feels like what it is: a series of articles stretched out a little to accomodate a best-seller format. The story is an intriguing one. An 18th century inventor rises from obscurity and against great odds and bias, produces an instrument that will prove of enormous benefit to his country and to humankind.

Just don't go into the reading of this book expecting great historical writing. Sobel acknowledges in a postscript that she doesn't include footnotes "because this book is intended as a popular account, not a scholarly study...". She has culled her research, for the most part, from interviewing historians, attending a seminar, and visiting various sites in England. At least she is forthright about her methodology, so she won't have to face the gauntlet that Kearns-Goodwin and Ambrose have recently had to run (mixed metaphor?).

Another minor irritation arises from the fact that one of the prominent blurbs one finds when opening the book comes from Diane Ackerman, whom Sobel later indentifies in her list of acknowledgments as her "dear friend." Again, at least she's being transparent about it, but it still strikes me as a bit disingenuous.

To her credit, Sobel does include a rather comprehensive bibliography, so those who want to further investigate Harrison's achievement are well guided.

Longitude is a good, quick summer read. For those who want some pith with their punch, however, I would recommend the A&E Sturridge video or CD adapted from this work.

If you never knew before what a major problem it was before the world knew how to measure longitude (and I certainly didn't), Dava Sobel tells of both the problem and the man who finally solved it in this easy-to-understand and interesting book. Meet John Harrison, the clockmaker/genius who fights the British scientific establishment to prove his method of measuring longitude does work. I found this book to be a quick, interesting read on a topic, and a man, most people don't know anything about, but should.

In the early 18th century, one of greatest scientific problems was calculating longitude on the high seas. At the time, navigators had two choices, both treacherous. They either traveled well-known routes, thus opening them to the threat of pirate attacks, or they used imprecise navigational methods to avoid that danger. But the latter method presented its own problems: it was more deadly because ships often got lost at sea or ran aground. Many sailors lost their lives and vast fortunes were dashed as ships crashed into rocks.

The problem was so serious that the English Parliament passed the Longitude Act in 1714. The Act established a panel of judges to study the problem and announced a prize of £20,000 (worth millions of dollars today) to anyone who could determine longitude accurately.

Enter John Harrison, a self-educated amateur clockmaker from Yorkshire. He believed that the solution lay in time, not in the heavens, as the scientific establishment had postulated. Harrison devoted his entire life to the pursuit of the longitude prize, all the while battling university scholars who thought him an incompetent crank.

In Longitude, author Dava Sobel tells Harrison's story with vigor and insight. It is clear that she greatly admires Harrison's genius and determination. She describes how he "went from...humble beginnings to riches by virtue of his own inventiveness and diligence, in the manner of Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin."

Throughout Harrison's illustrious career, he invented a number of innovative techniques for keeping accurate time-and solved many problems that had plagued clockmakers for centuries. Sobel writes: "Most pendulums of Harrison's day expanded with heat, so they grew longer and ticked out time more slowly in hot weather. When cold made them contract, they speeded up the seconds, and threw the clock's rate off in the opposite direction." Harrison solved this by "combining long and short strips of two different metals-brass and steel-in one pendulum..." Another invention of Harrison's was caged ball bearings, which are still used today.

Harrison did eventually win the longitude prize, but not until he was in his late 70s. The debate over the way longitude would be found raged on throughout his many trials over the decades between the 1720s and the 1770s. He submitted two clocks to the Longitude Board between 1737 and 1741 (named H1 and H2), but spent nearly twenty years perfecting H3, which he finally submitted in 1769. During this time, a rival 40 years younger than Harrison, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, insisted that the lunar distance method was the way that longitude was to be found. Sobel makes clear that Maskelyne, while a foe to Harrison, was not exactly a villain. Rather he was more like an anti-hero. While Harrison's method eventually won out, Maskelyne did make many important contributions to the science of astronomy. Sobel is objective enough to give credit where credit is due.

Longitude is written in a breezy, easy-to-read style. Sobel tells her tale chronologically, providing the essentials of the struggle while maintaining the historical context. She describes the painstaking observations and integrations that Harrison had to make in order to create his famous clocks. The solitary years he spent in his workshop focusing on his central goal is an inspiration to behold, particularly in an age like ours, where the individual is often looked upon with derision and contempt.

Because Longitude is a popular account, there are few technical details. For the most part, this lack of detail does not detract from the book, but occasionally the lack of technical description confuses the reader. For example, Sobel does not explain how one determines local time on a moving ship. Nevertheless, this flaw does not detract from the overall value of the book. Sobel tells her tale well and brims with enthusiasm for John Harrison and his wonderful invention that solved a centuries-long obstacle to safe navigation on the high seas. At the end of the book, Sobel touchingly describes her reaction to seeing Harrison's clocks for the first time. "Coming face-to-face with these machines at last-after having read countless accounts of their construction and trial, after having seen every detail of their insides and outsides in still and moving pictures-reduced me to tears."

Dava Sobel wastes no space in this concise record of a very specific set of historical occurences. Without ever becoming dry, she sets out the facts as she has gathered them, never elaborating with florid turns of phrase or unneccessary conjectures of any sort. I had no particular interest in clock-making, John Harrison, or longitude before reading this book, yet she held my attention throughout the work. Thanks to her, I now plan to visit the Old Royal Observatory when next in London, and I certainly plan to read her latest work, "Galileo's Daughter."

I had not read this book before, but the spate of great popular science writing and the success of books like Sobel's Galileo's Daughters, Johnson and Coates' Nabokov's Blues, and John Glenns memoirs especially as they recounted his pioneering space exploration brought me back to this book. Much like Glenn's book, its amazing you can take something as simple as figuring out how to draw a line on a map, or man's desire to put a man on the moon and end up with such fascinating accounts of man, his dreams, and the lengths he will risk to achieve them. Of course, Sobel is a great story teller and while Glenn's narratives are current enough for us all to "vibe" with them, Sobel has had to recreate a sense of the history and persons who people his book. Some people have liked this book more than Galileo's Daughter but they are really two different kinds of books. Longitude is a great retelling of a carefully researched "niche" in the history of man's quest for technological achievement while Galileo's story (much like Nabokov's) is the retelling a story from different point of view. This has been a great year for popular science writing.

Longitude the Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel was a very informative book. I thought the story line was very confusing. Each chapter had its own little stories that did not tie into the book until the very end. The Lone Genius the title refers to is John Harrison and the greatest problem of the 1700s was how to find longitude. England had its own board of longitude to solve the problem of the 1700s or award the person who solves the problem a large amount of money. During that time there were two theories people followed. The first theory was that to find longitude you had to be able to read the stars, the sun, the planets, and the moon. Many astronomers worked extremely hard to make this theory a scientific law, but the weather stopped that from happening. The weather at this time was very unpredictable which made it impossible to know when you could read the sky and when it would not be visible behind the clouds. The second theory was time. If someone could make a clock that could keep time in all weather conditions then you could find your longitude with a simple equation. John Harrison made five clocks that could keep the time nearly perfect. He named them H-1, H-2, H-3, H-4, and H-5. His creations led to clocks still used today such as the grandfather clock, pocket watches, and the tower clock in Brocklesby Park.
I would recommend this book to people that are very interested in history and are advanced readers. Although this book is short it has a great deal of information and is not an easy read. If you are planning to read this book I would recommend that you give yourself a good amount of time and take notes.

Dava Sobel has written a beautiful book about a subject that in a lesser author's hands could have been exceedingly boring. The need for a clock which would accurately keep time while on a sea voyage in order to help mariners determine their longitude and thus accurately determine where they would land doesn't seem like it would be that exciting. However, Sobel has given a wonderful account of the problems that were encountered without this device and how John Harrison, a clock maker, was determine to solve this problem with an accurate time piece that could be used even on ships.

The tremendous difficulties that Harrison had in convincing the British government authorities that he had indeed solved the problem are interesting and yet his endurance in solving this problem is almost heroic. Apparently, red tape and professional jealously are timeless qualities of human nature. This slim book provides an interesting glance into a subject which probably few have ever thought about. I would recommend this book highly to anyone who likes to know the story behind scientific discoveries which now seem almost quaint

An amazing story, well told. As I owned the original hard cover, which I enjoyed so much, I decided to purchase this version as my first eBook.

However, I had hoped that the Kindle version would include at least one picture (as in the "Illustrated Longitude") book. Sadly not a single image. Even the cover page is bare. The Illustrated version of the book is so much more enjoyable when you can actually see the amazing clocks and detail that Harrison designed and built. Still a great story but the images really help bring it to life and would have made eBook version 5 stars.

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

Dava Sobel's book is an interesting and concise recounting of the history of English efforts to develop the technology of fixing a ship's longitude at sea. Sobel's effort was focused, as she effectively covers all the relevant material and keeps the text interesting and understandable, resulting in an interesting and informative work that can be read in one or two sittings.

I thoroughly enjoyed the history, and found her descriptions of technical matters accurate and comprehensible. I, for one, did not miss the rigorous coverage that a purely academic history typically provides. Moreover, I afford kudos to the author for the omission of footnotes/endnotes, which I did not miss at all. The history that was spelled in the book was colorful and evocative, but did not generate the sense that the historical figures depicted were "characters" in a fictional work, a fact for which the author merits applause.

I highly recommend this work. The reader will not be bored, nor will most readers be damaged by the popular style or concise coverage of the topic. In this work, the reader will come to know about John Harrison, carpenter and amateur clockmaker. Sobel explains the import of the lack of ability for ships' captains to accurately fix their longitude, and weaves an entirely adequate historical context for this focused issue of interest. The major historical figures, Harrison and his colleagues and competition, are brought to life for the reader. Most importantly, I believe the reader will appreciate the ability to complete the entire text within the course of a few hours and still feel like the history has been thoroughly presented. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for the next work by this author. Enjoy.