From Fiction to Non-fiction - Excerpts from 'Longitude' - Part I

Longitude - The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time

Preface:
This is an excellent book for those who are interested in history of science. It just brings the whole science of longitude determination down to the layman without complicating or being wordy. Having studied myself these things back in my formative years as an engineer, it really was a great refresher. Though the book might look small, it just covers everything you need to know and feel, how big a problem this longitude determination was. Lot of interesting facts, and lot of beautifully selected epigraphs, which is not a surprise given the fact that the book was written by a woman. As is common with British writers, the author of the book also is too proud of the achievements of her ancestors. "Oh dear! how so pompous!"

Note:
This particular blog is going to be not just phrases from the book, but also some facts and events that I felt were quite interesting.

Pg ix:
... two sources of accurate time were available: the radio ... and the bells of the courthouse clock

Just reminds me of the beep sound before the hourly news in the radio. Also, its just amazing to listen to the courthouse bells or the church bells on a silent afternoon. In these days of airtight offices, it has become a thing to be longed for.

Pg ix - x:
Some of the townspeople did not have wristwatches and depended on the courthouse bells for marking the beginning and end of the workday.

I am just wondering how would people in India would have started and ended their working days, where the courthouse bells, church bells or clock towers were not there. Sometimes, I think that is the single-most important reason, why most of us are not punctual.

Pg 4:
The placement of the prime meridian is a purely political decision. ... The zero-degree parallel latitude is fixed by the laws of the nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.

How often do we take things just for granted, which are an integral part of our lives, but are mere conventions and traditions.

Christopher Columbus followed a straight path across the Atlantic when he "sailed the parallel" on his 1492 journey, and the technique would doubtless have carried him to the Indies had not the Americas intervened.

For all these I have been wondering, why didn't Columbus reach India even with good maps and compasses available. Yippy! got my answer!

Pg 4-5: Longitude Measurement Method
To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard the ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude--at that very same moment. ... Everyday at sea, when the navigator resets his ship's clock to local noon when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and then consults the home-port clock, every hour's discrepancy between them translates into another fifteen degrees of longitude.

Looks extremely simple eh?

Pg 6:
From Vasco da Gama to Vasco Nunez de Balboa, from Ferdinand Magellan to Sir Francis Drake--they all got where they were going willy-nilly, by forces attributed to good luck or the grace of God.

Wondering how did our great Thamizh Kings, especially the Cholas conquer the far-east territories! Was it sheer luck too?

Motivation for determining Longitude:
As more and more sailing vessels set out to conquer or explore new territories, to wage war, or to ferry gold and commodities between foreign lands, the wealth of nations floated upon the oceans. ... no ship owned a reliable means to establish her whereabouts. In consequence, untold numbers ... died... In a single such accident ... two thousand men lost their lives.

What would have we named "shipping", if the same problem persisted even this day?

Pg 7:
Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christian Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help.

But none could, and finally the solution was found out by a carpenter! This just reminds of the popular story of the emergence of cone-ice creams: a worker suggesting the cups be made edible as well and that would reduce the waste generated. History repeats itself ;)

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.
Reminds me of the good old thamizh proverb "Ghosts came out while digging up a well" (Thanglish version: kinaru thoenda poi boodham kelambuchaan!).

Pg 8:
The British Parliament in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, making a prize equal to a king's ransom (seven million dollars in today's currency) for a practicable and useful means of determining longitude.
Again reminds me of the Nagesh's role as Tharumi in the movie Thiruvilaiyaadal!

Actually, the inventor of the chronometer's, John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude sounds like a real life enactment of the Tharumi part of Thiruvilaiyadar Puraanam!

Really, the book has been written like a scientific article. Very precise, and the first chapter telling us everything in a very condensed manner, while inbetween chapters cover one-by-one the rest of the timeline of the development. The last chapter concludes and summarizes the developments and adds later developments and changes to the method.

Here comes one of the most beautiful epigraphs chosen for this book

Pg 11:
"They that go down to the Seas in Ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep" - PSALM 107


Pg 13 - 14:
... 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 judgement, he then determined his longitude.

The further I read this book, the curiosity to know how the ancient civilizations (Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans and Greeks), and the Vikings navigated in the ocean. The interesting fact is that this method of dead-reckoning is still used in missiles, unmanned aircrafts, and also in tunnels as a replacement for GPS, when there is no signal available from GPS satellites. Here is what the author feels about dead reckoning,

Too often, the technique of dead reckoning marked him for a dead man.

Pg 14:
Long voyages waxed longer for lack of longitude, and the extra time at sea condemned soldiers to the dreaded disease of scurvy. The oceangoing diet of the day, devoid of fresh fruits and vegetables, deprived them of vitamin C, and their bodies' connective tissues deteriorated as a result. The blood vessels leaked ... wounds failed to heal ... when the blood vessels around their brains ruptured, they died.

Oh my goodness! That is for sure painful than the most painful of deaths!

Pg 15:
By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly three hundred ships a year sailed between the British Isles and the West Indies to ply the Jamaica trade.

That's heavy traffic given the above limitations!

Pg 21 - 22:
The sky turns day to night with a sunset, measures the passing months by the phases of the moon, and marks each season's change with a solstice or an equinox. The rotating, revolving Earth is a cog in a clockwork universe, and people have told time by its motion since time began.

A very poetic prose, and here you can see a glimpse of the author's precise writing skills. No single detail left out and yet short and really sweet!

Pg 24 - 26: Galileo and Lunar methods
... Galileo worked out a longitude solution. Eclipses of the moons of the Jupiter, he claimed, occurred one thousand times annually-and so predictably that one could set a watch by them. ... it was never possible to view the hands of the Jupiter clock during daylight hours ... Nighttime observations could be carried on for only part of the year ... only when skies were clear.
In spite of these obvious difficulties, Galileo had designed a special navigation helmet for finding longitude with the Jovian satellites. The headgear-the celatone-has been compared to a brass gas mask in appearance, with a telescope attached to one of the eyeholes. Through the empty eyehole, the observer's naked eye could locate the steady light of Jupiter in the sky. The telescope afforded the other eye a look at the planet's moons.
...
Galileo himself conceded that, even on land, the pounding of one's heart could cause the whole of Jupiter to jump out of the telescope's field of view.
Nevertheless, Galileo tried to peddle his method to the Tuscan government and to officials in the Netherlands, where other prize money lay unclaimed.

When a scientist is quite famous, his pride rather than his work is at stake. This reminds of the fact that Alfred Wegner-the man who proposed the plate tectonic theory-knew that his explanation he gave to the plate tectonic movement were wrong, but yet he maintained they were true until his death.

Pg 27:
Galileo's method for finding longitude at last became generally accepted after 1650-but only on land. Surveyors and cartographers used Galileo's technique to redraw the world. And it was in the arena of mapmaking that the ability to determine longitude won its first great victory.

This reminds me of the statement 'you never know'. Yes, you never know what something is really capable of!
But the precise measurement of the Earth meant that the boundaries had to be remeasured. Here are some funny events,

Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies. ... With borders of kingdoms hanging in the balance, numerous astronomers found gainful employment observing the moons and improving the accuracy of the printed tables.

Pg 28:
Giovanni Domenico Cassini
....
Having become a French citizen in 1673, he is remembered as a French astronomer, so that his name today is given as Jean-Dominique as often as Giovanni Domenico.

Pg 29 - 30:
... Ole Roemer made a startling discovery: The eclipses of all four Jovian satellites would occur ahead of schedule when the Earth moved closest to Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. Similarly, the eclipses fell behind the predicted scheduled by several minutes when the Earth moved farthest from Jupiter. Roemer concluded, correctly, that the explanation lay in the velocity of light. ...
Until this realization, light was thought to get from place to place in a twinkling, with no finite velocity that could be measured by man.
... Roemer used the departures from predicted eclipse times to measure the speed of light for the first time in 1676.

Birth of the Greenwich Observatory
Pg 30 - 33:
... the sieur de St. Pierre ... proposed (to King Charles II of England) to find longitude by the position of the moon and some select stars ... The king found the idea intriguing, so he redirected the efforts of his royal commissioners, who included Robert Hooke, a polymath ... and Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul's Cathedral.
For the appraisal of St. Pierre's theory, the commissioners called in the expert testimony of John Flamsteed, a twenty-seven-year-old astronomer. Flamsteed's report judged the method to be sound in theory but impractical in the extreme.
...
Flamsteed, ... suggested that the king might remedy this situation by establishing an observatory with a staff to carry out the necessary work. The king complied. ... the Observatory at Greenwich ... Commissioner Hooke directed the actual building work, which got under way in July of 1675 and consumed the better part of one year.

A touching dedication!

I was reading an anthology of a Indian Historian-cum-mathematician-cum-statistician: D.D. Kosambi. The book is called "Combined methods in Indology and other writings". The first chapter is an introduction to how Mr. Kosambi worked and how his work is important in the present day context with respect to Indology. Then comes the part of the personality of Mr. Kosambi, where his love and care for his family members, friends, and peers are brought out. In writing that the author takes out a dedication of Mr. Kosambi. Here goes that dedication ...

"At a time when my health and finances were both ruined, and the work would have been suspended, she put at my disposal, unsolicited, the meagre savings of a lifetime devoted to the service of her children. To these funds, given without condition in the disappointed hope that I should use them to improve my health, this edition owes its very existence. A matron in the noblest Indian tradition, one to whom even Bhaasa's broken hero of the shattered thigh, abandoned on the field of battle, might pray with his dying breath, 'If merit be mine and rebirth fall to my lot, be thou again my mother', she deserves to have a far better work dedicated to her, just as she deserves a far better son. However, if she will condone the shortcomings of the book as she has those of the child, both are hers."

After reading this I was numb for a while. I really appreciate the man who wanted to dedicate only the best to his mother. What great ideals!

If you are interested, here is more about Mr. Kosambi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._D._Kosambi