TITLE: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time AUTHOR: Dava Sobel DATE PUBLISHED: 2005 FORMAT: Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780802714626 __________________________ DESCRIPTION: "Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known tha...
A lovely account about timekeeping. I'm easily obsessed with old machines and especially clocks and watches, so, yeah, I like it.
I can't remember if I read the book first or saw the television series first, but some combination of the two was like a long, calm, very safe ocean voyage.
Read about 80% and I'm just not feeling it. Interesting subject matter, but it's a slow read. It felt like the race to discover a lunar method for determining the longitude was happening in real time.
This is a great book. It's one of the excellent historical non-fiction books that is really well written and interesting, even if you're not normally interested in the subject. I can honestly say I have never once wondered about how longitude is determined, or why it matters. Until I read this book,...
Fascinating book! I never realized that figuring out longitude was such a big problem. There is lots of scientific info in the book, but it's not so technical I couldn't understand it.
Sobel ranks right up there with Mark Kurlansky for writing detailed, fascinating accounts of historical technology. Calculating longitude had bedeviled mariners for centuries. To do so required an extremely accurate timepiece.John Harrison thought he could solve the problem. The book is a nice comb...
What a fascinating book. Latitude was relatively simple to determine. Longitude proved such a difficult problem that wihtout its solution the British Empire would not have succeeded.
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