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Free PDF Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel

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

Free PDF Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel

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Amazon.com Review

The thorniest scientific problem of the eighteenth century was how to determine longitude. Many thousands of lives had been lost at sea over the centuries due to the inability to determine an east-west position. This is the engrossing story of the clockmaker, John "Longitude" Harrison, who solved the problem that Newton and Galileo had failed to conquer, yet claimed only half the promised rich reward.

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From Publishers Weekly

While sailors can readily gauge latitude by the height of the sun or guiding stars above the horizon, the measurement of longitude bedeviled navigators for centuries, resulting in untold shipwrecks. Galileo, Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley entreated the moon and stars for help, but their astronomical methods failed. In 1714, England's Parliament offered #20,000 (equivalent to millions of dollars today) to anyone who could solve the problem. Self-educated English clockmaker John Harrison (1693-1776) found the answer by inventing a chronometer?a friction-free timepiece, impervious to pitch and roll, temperature and humidity?that would carry the true time from the home port to any destination. But Britain's Board of Longitude, a panel of scientists, naval officers and government officials, favored the astronomers over humble "mechanics" like Harrison, who received only a portion of the prize after decades of struggle. Yet his approach ultimately triumphed, enabling Britannia to rule the waves. In an enthralling gem of a book, former New York Times science reporter Sobel spins an amazing tale of political intrigue, foul play, scientific discovery and personal ambition. BOMC and History Book Club selections. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 224 pages

Publisher: Walker Books; 1 edition (November 1, 1995)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0802713122

ISBN-13: 978-0802713124

Product Dimensions:

4.8 x 0.9 x 7.7 inches

Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.5 out of 5 stars

1,047 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#688,197 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Longitude is west to east, east to west. But it's not that simple because, for example, the equator is wider around the earth than the Tropic of Capricorn or the Arctic Circle. Although latitude is fixed by the earth and Columbus could sail a "straight line" in 1492 relative to a fixed latitudinal parallel, longitude made sailors feel they were on a train and looking at another train, trying to determine which one just began moving.After reading a book about Mason and Dixon and all of the incredibly (for me) complex math and astronomy involved, I was slow to begin this book. Author Dava Sobel, however, cuts through all the more complicated principles like a good pre-calculus teacher. I would even suggest this book could appeal to adventurous 8th graders. The history is impressive. The Harrison family were watchmakers, but as very precise and diligent watchmakers competitive with the Royal Society and haughty astronomers like Nevil Maskelyne. John Harrison had size, cost, material, temperature fluctuations, moisture, waves, and many more atmospheric obstacles to confront while those relying on lunar readings went much further to produce much less. For the record, I had never heard of John Harrison. His predecessors include Halley, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo, whose attempts to time the speed of light is briefly retold here.This is summer reading, a hero's tale, good defeating bad, The Little Engine that Could. If you or your child is interested in sailing, navigation, astronomy, inventions, machining, or how the British came to rule the word for a time, this is a book to read and re-read.

I was left hoping for more detail and depth. This story is sort of a biography about a person whom the author explains there is not much known. The subject's work product is and has been well known and studied at length, but there are not enough details about the technology included in this book. At the end of the book the author explains that she purposefully omitted information that she did not think her readers are smart enough to consider. The premise of using a clock to compute longitude is mentioned repeatedly through the first half of the book, but an explanation of the operating principal and technique is only finally hinted at in the later stages of the book. The idea is that at any instant one can correlate "local" time to some known "reference" time as it occurs at some specific reference location and compute the local angle of longitude in relation to the reference location. The clocks being discussed are the devices used to reliably transport the "reference" time for comparative use in other locales. I have been aware of the technique for a long while and it became a guessing game to anticipate when the idea was finally going to be presented to, and shared with, readers. I think that many readers will enjoy the book much more if the premise is described, in detail, in an earlier portion of the story so that it is more obvious why one may appreciate all the great efforts made in the field of horology to achieve a series of incremental advances in performance and reliability. This book reads like a book report or a term paper rather than as a comprehensive book. It seems as if the author knows her subject well, but did not benefit from effective editing and/or insightful guidance regarding the perspective of a reader when formatting the story line into book form. I am surprised that some other more satisfying explanation of the history and circumstances has not been offered as a replacement for this book and its best seller status.

This book is a fascinating history of the development of a mechanical chronometer. The author lays out the historical background and competing interests so that the reader can fully appreciate the challenges faced by John Harrison and his son William. It shows that John Harrison was like the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (central character in the movie "The man who knew infinity") in that he was poor and therefore self educated. His vocation was carpentry and his intimate knowledge of wood was employed in his first chronometer. He knew how to build sound grandfather clocks and that experience fed into his first chronometer for seafaring. He almost let his £20,000 prize slip away, because he wasn't satisfied with his first clock designed for the sea. Had he resisted the urge to build a better clock before claiming the prize, he would have won the prize out right. Instead, he ended up competing head-on with a lunar distance technique created by people favored by the committee that oversaw the giving of the prize money. The books paints the complex story of Harrison's Great achievements and does so in an easy to read format.

In the age of GPS it is hard to believe that there was a time when sailors could not navigate the seas in safety. This book is so interesting and easy to read, yet it explains the discovery of how to determine Longitude in a way that is fascinating for adults and excellent for young teenagers as well. I always have three copies of the Illustrated book on hand. I give them as gifts all the time. I read this book while I was traveling and I had the opportunity to visit the The Royal Naval Museum, in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard, England, that houses these wonderful clocks. One of my favorite books.

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Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel PDF

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel PDF