from slavenrm

I picked up this very little gem at a library book sale, so the first thing to note is that there are copies everywhere, so don't by any means bother to pay full price for one. Second most important is to note that there are apparently two versions. There are those, like mine, that have never eve...

from neurodrew

Read in a single evening, a Christmas gift from Joanne Shea. Sobel wrote a journalistic account of the quest for the Longitude prize, and the tricks that the Royal Astronomers played on William Harrison, the inventor of the first chronometer that did not vary with wave motion at sea. The astronom...

from tahoegirl

Who knew that a story about the invention to measure longitude would be so exciting. This is the first book that I have read my Ms. Sobel and it will not be the last. She made something that could have been overly academic accessible and interesting. I had never heard of the longitude prize and I...

from readingrat

A short little history of the various attempts to solve the longitude problem. I have encountered this same story briefly before in a book I read last year, The Mapmakers by by John Noble Wilford, but this book focuses more exclusively on John Harrison and his battle for getting his highly accura...

from mamzel

This is a brief and to-the-point narration of the history of the search for determining longitude and the struggles of John Harrison to build a clock that could withstand the motion, humidity, and temperature variations of sea voyages. This endeavor was so crucial to the exploration of the world ...