The largest reward of £20,000- truly a king's ransom- was offered by Britain's Parliament in 1714. To encourage a solution, governments established prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful.
Thousands of lives and the fortunes of nations hung on a resolution to the longitude problem. All too often throughout the ages of exploration, voyages ended in disaster when crew and cargo were either lost at sea or destroyed upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. The Illustrated Longitude recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the greatest scientific problem of the eighteenth and three prior centuries: determining how a captain could pinpoint his ship's location at sea. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Ī fully illustrated edition of the international best-seller Longitude. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world. 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. In stark contrast, 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. The scientific establishment of Europe―from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton―had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution.
Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land.
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.
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