Dava Sobel

Longitude

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  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king’s ransom (several million dollars in today’s currency) for a Practicable and Useful means of determining longitude.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    In the course of their struggle to find longitude, scientists struck upon other discoveries that changed their view of the universe. These include the first accurate determinations of the weight of the Earth, the distance to the stars, and the speed of light.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    express purpose of determining longitude by the heavens.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christiaan Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    The active quest for a solution to the problem of longitude persisted over four centuries and across the whole continent of Europe.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    on October 22, 1707, at the Scilly Isles four homebound British warships ran aground and nearly two thousand men lost their lives.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    such clocks would slow down, or speed up, or stop running altogether.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    Precise knowledge of the hour in two different places at once—a longitude prerequisite so easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches—was utterly unattainable up to and including the era of pendulum clocks.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    At the Equator, where the girth of the Earth is greatest, fifteen degrees stretch fully one thousand miles. North or south of that line, however, the mileage value of each degree decreases. One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.
  • Abby Lefeminehas quoted6 years ago
    port clock, every hour’s discrepancy between them translates into another fifteen degrees of longitude.
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