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Book: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time
Quotes of Book: Longitude: The True Story of a
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  1. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    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. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on.
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  2. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept!
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  3. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude-at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees.
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  4. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma-one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.
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  5. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them-with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace."
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  6. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.
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  7. Dava Sobel _ Longitude: The True Story of a

    the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel's ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix of bravery and greed, the sea captains of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries relied on "dead reckoning" to gauge their distance east or west of home port. The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how quickly the ship receded from this temporary guidepost. He noted the crude speedometer reading in his ship's logbook, along with the direction of travel, which he took from the stars or a compass, and the length of time on a particular course, counted with a sandglass or a pocket watch. Factoring in the effects of ocean currents, fickle winds, and errors in judgment, he then determined his longitude. He routinely missed his mark, of course-searching
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