June 2017 Discussion: Longitude by Dava Sobel (spoilers)
 

The time has come to discuss the June 2017 MobileRead Book Club selection, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel. What did you think?

Let me just start this by saying "THIS BOOK NEEDS PICTURES!" She talked about this gorgeous piece of mechanical craftmanship and art and how ornate the first one was and yet there were not any pictures in the book, at least not the book that I have.

Argh!!!

They did show the clocks (or perhaps replicas) in the movie though.

The original hardback did have pictures, if I remember correctly, and the movie, of course, has either the real clocks or very realistic replicas. (I've seen H1, H3 and H4, but I don't think H2 was on display when I was there. Or maybe it was H2 on display and H3 wasn't. Not sure.)

I'll have a lot more to say later, when I have a moment, but one thing was brought to mind by current events and the first chapter of the book. In 1707, 2,000 men lost their lives in a single catastrophe caused by an incorrectly calculated longitude. And last week, 79 (or more) people lost their lives in a fire in a London high rise. The first led to the Longitude Act, and one can only speculate about what the second will do, but it's sure to lead to changes. Not to minimize (not in ANY way), but most people who lived in the tower survived. Two people survived the shipwreck in 1707. Is it any wonder that Parliament was willing to pay a monstrous sum to find a solution?

Try this link to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Thank you! I did end up finding some decent pictures online but when I was reading it I didn't have internet access. I normally read while on the train so spotty coverage at best.

If memory serves one of the people that survived (the shipwreck) was the Admiral. While he was still in a weakened state though a local woman killed him for the ring on his finger, only confessing to the crime on her own deathbed.

As I understand it H4 is never wound up anymore. It's considered so valuable that they don't want to risk ordinary wear and tear which would over vast stretches of time destroy the parts of the watch. Thanks for the link CRussel. :)

I wasn't much of a fan of Longitude I found it focused more on the politics than the actual making of these clocks. It was not well written. It felt rather rushed.

Certainly there was a lot of politics behind the story JSWolf. Just like today there were those who favored one position and those who favored the other side's position. Man doesn't change much I guess. In 'Longitude' it was the Astronomers vs. the Mechanicals (clockmakers) a few hundred yrs prior to that it was the Church vs. Scientists. Now days it's things like Politicians vs. Scientists about things like Global Warming. The topic of contention changes and so do the names of the factions but the propensity to argue for one side or the other stays the same. I think that's one of the pros of the book. It points out that what we think of as being the way things are today (i.e. political fighting) is actually a very old thing indeed.

Agreed.

Personally, I very much enjoyed the book, when I read it ages ago just after it was first published. I though it well written, with a good balance between the technical/scientific/navigational issue and the political (read: elite "scientists" vs. working class genius) issues.

I have somewhat qualified feelings about the book. I enjoyed it, it moved along, I'm now better informed, I'm glad to have read it. That said, it's a case of the defects of its virtues, for me. There wasn't enough "meat" in it. I recognize the difficulty in that not much is known about Harrison's life, but I'd have liked a more immersive experience in his times. Still most entertaining and informative; I think it was at its best when it laid out the crying need for a means to determine longitude.

I can only echo Dazrin, though, that it's a crime the ebook has no pictures!

In my case it even made me $20.00 richer. I picked up a used copy in hard cover at a local used book store here in town and when I opened it there was a $20 bill lying in between two of the pages. I don't know if the previous owner had hidden a hoard n the book or if someone used the bill as a bookmark but it was a pleasant surprise either way. :)

I listened to the audiobook while commuting. I glad I did as I learned a bit I wouldn't otherwise know about. Jon's comments in the other thread had me primed to be critical of the writing and I felt the story didn't flow well, but the interesting subject carried me through the book.

Without getting political, one of the important points this book makes about science is the need to address what is, not what you expect/want it to be. The scientific method is about observing and addressing the results of your experiment, not about trying to twist the facts to fit a pre-conceived notion. I did NOT think it was about elite v. working class, though that certainly entered in to it, but much more about trying to shape the facts to fit the required result.

Part of that (I think) seems to have been that they had preconceptions of how the Longitude problem would be solved. The Astronomers assumed that the method would involve using the stars (the celestial clock) and that it was impossible to construct a mechanical clock that was accurate enough for the job. Of course back then the technology didn't exist (prior to Harrison) to make such a clock. We still have the problem today of thinking that because something hasn't been done it probably can't be.

Great insight, Charlie! I'll elaborate, if I may, that it's thus the problem that factions get invested in particular theories and methods and double down (to use the current cant phrase) when challenged. While scientists now espouse the scientific method as they did not necessarily do in the 18th century, we still have ample evidence of the behavior in other spheres today.

Even in science we still see it. Einstein and his constant is an example from more recent history. His equations showed that the universe is expanding so he introduced an extra to cancel that out because he didn't want to believe it. Then Hubble showed that in fact the universe is expanding (by the color shift of stars) which shows that even very intelligent scientists can still make errors.

One thing I found interesting is the amount of complicated mathematical calculations required to use any of the astronomical methods of determining longitude. Before Maskalyne's tables were published the process took hours and hours, and was, even with the tables, subject to error and miscalculation. But even more importantly, required a mathematical skill that wasn't necessarily to be found with every naval captain! The beauty of the chronometer method enabled by Harrison's watches was that the calculation took a matter of minutes, was not nearly so subject to error, and didn't require complex, advanced mathematical calculations.

And was so simple you could explain it to someone/anyone in a few moments. Not something you could do with Maskalyne's tables I'm thinking.

No, not even once the heavy lifting of Lunars had been done by tables, they were still far more complex. And remember that those tables weren't published until well after Harrison's clocks had amply demonstrated to an unbiased mind (if one could have been found) that they could and did solve the problem simply and quite elegantly.

The one real caveat of the Harrison clocks, and their immediate successors, was the cost and time to create. It was quite a while before the price came down to something that could reasonably be afforded by a seagoing captain. And even when the price got down to somewhere below £100, it was still more expensive than a Rolex of today.

Right! It only took 1 paragraph for me to understand the clock method, you still need to determine your latitude but that was much easier to do.

So basically you simply add or subtract the difference in time (east or west) and then depending on your latitude you figure that you have traveled distance x since the same time the day prior. It must have made land charting a bit easier as well. You could trust that you were at a given place rather than just your best guess as to your position like in earlier maps.

Nearly that simple. You go through the longitude to get to the distance, though, since the longitude is actually more important. Your latitude is determined by the angle of a known star, the moon, or sun above the horizon and by the 1730s, this was measured using a sextant. (Many commercial captains today still use one regularly, even though GPS is far more precise. But then, I've been known to use a slide rule in recent memory. ;) ) Your longitude is determined by the difference in local noon v. Greenwich Mean Time noon.

The problem comes when you can't get a reliable sighting to determine exact local noon, or your latitude. Then you're down to dead reckoning, using the speed of the ship (literally done by tossing a weighted line over the side of the ship, and counting the number of knots in the rope in a given time), the compass heading, and a guess of the amount of current and "leeway" the ship is making.

I once had a boss who still used a slide rule. Much faster, he said, and of course that was true.

Good luck trying to buy a new one these days. However, it appears there's a thriving secondary market on eBay for them, with Versalog 1460s going for anywhere from $20-$45 USD. I'm tempted to buy one, actually.

Dead reckoning is probably the method the Admiral was using in 1707 when the fleet of ships were wrecked. It sounds like you really needed both your latitude and longitude to be accurate or you were in deep trouble. And what form that trouble took could vary depending on where you were. It can't have been easy to live the life of a seaman back then.

There's a reason they call it dead reckoning, unfortunately.

I have now read 4 of the books that were nominated for June and I think we ended up with one of the better ones, both for discussion and for quality.

Gulp is a lot of fun and well written but a bit hard to stomach sometimes; I'm also not sure how good the discussion would have been. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is a VERY high level primer, as it was intended, but that didn't translate into a great book for me. Overall, I like hearing NGT talk more than I like his writing. What If? is also a lot of fun but I am not sure it would have lead to great discussion.

I enjoyed reading Longitude but it suffered a bit from being read shortly after Sextant by David Barrie which covers the invention of the sextant and advances of navigation while also looking at the marine surveyors of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Certainly those surveyors owe a debt to Harrison and his clocks. The sextant could tell you where you were in terms of N/S of the equator (Latitude) but it was Harrison's time piece that opened things up for greater precision in fixing your longitude (E/W of your home port) and therefore allowed the continents to be pictured fairly accurately on maps for the first time.

Correct, which meant that the two books overlapped more then a bit and I was not quite as interested in the additional politics of Longitude as I was in the additional navigational experience of Sextant.

Longitude was just too lightweight. It felt like it was written for grade school kids.

I agree that it was a quick and easy read but I can just imagine how my grade school kids would react if I tried to read it to them :snore:

I imagine a lot of the 'lightweight' feeling comes from the fact that we have so little documentation about the life of John Harrison. Shakespeare is the same way. We know little about his actual day to day life in comparison to his plays. Probably in both cases it's a matter of people not thinking in the long term. It likely never occurred to them that someone should really document Harrison's life for the future any more than it probably occurred to friends of Shakespeare to do so in any great detail when they collected the First Folio for publication.