Longitude

This narrative history recounts the eighteenth-century search for a reliable way to find longitude at sea, a problem that caused shipwrecks and that Parliament tried to solve with a prize. The central figure is John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker, who spends decades building marine timekeepers accurate enough to keep Greenwich time on a rolling ship. Against him stand many astronomers who prefer a lunar-distance method, and the commissioners of the Board of Longitude who delay awarding him full credit. Voyages, tests, and mechanical detail carry the story. The book is an account of one scientific-practical contest, not a full life of the Royal Society.

Bound in grey-brown paper, printed with a wrap-around drawing of the rear part of H-3 by John Harrison.