Book Club - Longitude
Event Details
06:30PM - 08:30PM
Map address
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time, by Dava Sobel, is the story of English clockmaker John Harrison and how he figured out how to track longitude, or the east-west position of ships. 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. 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. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution.
One man, in complete opposition to the scientific community, 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. 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. 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.
