Longitude

846 Words2 Pages

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is written by Dava Sobel. The book is called Longitude because it is about a clock maker who was able to determine longitude. Determining longitude was the superlative scientific question in the eighteenth century that Galileo and Newton were not able to resolve.
The principal inspiration behind the invention completed in this book is that many sailors were lost at seas as a result of their ignorance regarding longitude. So, without the competence to determine longitude, many innocent lives were disintegrated at seas.
England’s Parliament was desperate for an answer to this problem. So, in 1714 England’s Parliament offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who invented a method or a device for measuring longitude and then proved successful.
As a result, a Frenchman, sieur de St. Pierre, frowned on the moons of Jupiter as means of determining longitude. He theorized that longitude could be found by the position of the moon and select stars. At the time, Dr. Edmond Halley proved this theory wrong. After many observations, Halley concluded that the moon’s rate of revolution around the earth was accelerating overtime.
John Harrison was a simple clockmaker and a self-educated person who was accredited for finding longitude by means of a timeke...

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