[BITList] The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius

[John Feltham]

G'day folks,

Some of you might like to download this file from Rapidshare. It is 97 Mb in size. If anyone has any trouble getting it just let me know. OTOH you should be able to get it out of your local library.



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The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
By Dava Sobel, William J. H. Andrewes

go to:
http://rapidshare.com/files/301363917/Longitude.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/301363917/Longitude.rar | 97352 KB
Publisher:   Walker & Company
Number Of Pages:   216
Publication Date:   2003-01-01
ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0802775934
ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780802775931


Description: 
When Dava Sobel's Longitude was published to universal acclaim in 1995, readers voiced only one regret: that it was not illustrated. Now, William Andrewes, the man who organized and hosted the Longitude Symposium that inspired her book, has joined Dava Sobel to create a richly illustrated version of her classic story.

The Illustrated Longitude recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the thorniest scientific problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the great age of exploration, sailors attempted to navigate the oceans without any means of measuring their longitude: All too often, voyages ended in total disaster when both crew and cargo were captured or lost upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of seafaring nations hung on a resolution.

To encourage a solution, governments established major prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward of £20,000-truly a king's ransom-was offered by the British Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment-from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton-had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that solved the problem by keeping precise time at sea, called today the chronometer. His trials and tribulations to win the prize throughout a forty-year obsession are the culmination of this remarkable story.

The Illustrated Longitude contains the entire original narrative of Longitude, redesigned to accompany 178 images chosen by Will Andrewes: from portraits of every important figure in the story to maps, diagrams, and photographs of scientific instruments, especially John Harrison's remarkable clocks. Andrewes's elegant captions emphasize the scientific and historical events surrounding the images, and they tell their own dramatic story of longitude, paralleling and illuminating Dava Sobel's memorable tale.



Amazon.com Review: 
Dava Sobel's Longitude tells the story of how 18th-century scientist and clockmaker William Harrison solved one of the most perplexing problems of history--determining east-west location at sea. This lush, colorfully illustrated edition adds lots of pictures to the story, giving readers a more satisfying sense of the times, the players, and the puzzle. This was no obscure, curious difficulty--without longitude, ships often found themselves so far off course that sailors would starve or die of scurvy before they could reach port. When a nationally-sponsored contest offered a hefty cash prize to the person who could develop a method to accurately determine longitude, the race was on. In the end, the battle of accuracy--and wills--fought between Harrison and arch-rival Maskelyne was ruthless and dramatic, worthy of a Hollywood feature film. Longitude's story is surprising and fascinating, offering a window into the past, before Global Positioning Satellites made it look easy. --Therese Littleton




Summary: "Time is to clock as mind is to brain."
Rating: 5
The book is great, and so clearly so, that I am not going to argue about it. Its illustrations: tasty, superb. Text: lucid, informative. Its structure: dramatic, great man theory of history. 

One thing that struck me was the book's scattered but arresting meditations on time. Aristotle had defined time as a number that the mind imposes on motion. Seneca said that once you wasted time, you never got it back for a second chance. Augustine, too, speculated on time. Curiously, the word "time" is not in the index of THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE. But, throughout, the two authors have their fair go at its nature and at 400 years of men striving to tame time and make it useful. Their goal: to solve the "longitude" problem -- especially during sea voyages out of sight of land. Captains in 1700 had very inaccurate ideas about how far east or west they were of any particular spot on a map. And their errors were not seldom deadly. 

Thus the authors give longitude its philosophical/engineering context: 

-- "Time is to clock as mind is to brain." The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. ... time escapes irretrievably, while we watch" (p. 42) 

-- In the early 1700s sundials still ruled the popular imagination. Sundial time was "true" time. By contrast, humble clocks, registering 24 hours day and night, could only produce artificial "mean" time (p. 80). 

-- The book's very last words wax lyrical about time and the man who put it to work for sailors, after solving the longitude riddle that had stood for 400 years: 

"With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth -- temporal -- dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch" (p. 210). 
-OOO-



Summary: The Illustrated Longitude
Rating: 5
I read the original 10 years ago, almost in a single sitting. It is a fascinating story of scientific discovery and political intrigue caused by competing solutions to the discovery of a reliable and cost effective method to calculate longitude. This new illustrated version has brought it much more alive showing the historical documents and instruments involved in the process. The captions describing the illustrations are a work itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the re-read - far richer than the first time since it provided a better description of the mechanics of the calculations involved.



Summary: There is no Shortitude about Longitude
Rating: 5
This book is an incredible account of one man's persistence and ingenuity that solved a thousand year old riddle and changed maritime history. The illustrations and pictures make this story leap from the pages and straight into your imagination. If you like a story about overcoming obstacles, history and genius then you'll love this book. Out of a possible rating of 5 stars is would rate it as a 6!



Summary: A Wonderful Book
Rating: 4
This is a book that I have enjoyed reading and viewing the great illustrations. I have learned so much about a topic of which I knew next to nothing.



Summary: Longitude; long on interest
Rating: 5
Longitude tells a fascinating, little-recalled history of the invention of navigational methods necessary to sail the globe accurately. Inventor John Harrison solves the dilemma of adjusting for the difference between longitudinal distances at the equator, and north or south to the poles. Ancillary details include how scurvey was conquered, economic imact of wayward sailing voyages, and social aspects of world-wide trade on the high seas. The illustrated version is a pleasure to the eye.



 



ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




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