Quote:
Originally Posted by ekbell
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.
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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.