Imaginary lines -- The sea before time -- Adrift in a clockwork universe -- Time in a bottle -- Powder of sympathy -- The prize -- Cogmaker's journal -- The grasshopper goes to sea -- Hands on Heaven's clock -- The diamond timekeeper -- Trial by fire and water -- A tale of two portraits -- The second voyage of Captain James Cook -- The mass production of genius -- In the meridian courtyard

Describes the forty-year effort of John Harrison to invent the chronometer, the first instrument able to keep accurate time for navigational purposes

"Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day -- and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution. The quest for a solution had occupied scientists for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, England's parliament upped the ante by offering a king's ransom (£20,000, or approximately $12 million in today's currency) to anyone whose method or device proved successful and reproducible. The scientific establishment throughout Europe -- from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton -- had mapped the heavens in it pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution -- a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and absurdity, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking."--Page 2-3 of cover

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