MobileRead June 2017 Discussion: Longitude by Dava Sobel (spoilers)

[crich70]

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.

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.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by crich70

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.

[JSWolf]

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

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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

[crich70]

Originally Posted by ekbell

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

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.