Excerpts from 'Longitude' - Part II

A beautiful epigraph!
Pg 34:
An event is such a little piece of time-and-space
you can mail it through the slotted eye of a cat.
- DIANE ACKERMAN, "Mystic Communion of Clocks"

Some poetic prose!
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. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.

With those words in mind, I am just wondering how can the word time-keeper be changed to comply to this reality!!!

Christiaan Huygens - Dutch Physicist
Pg 37 - 38:
... a gifted astronomer, had divined that the "moons" Galileo observed at Saturn were really a ring, impossible as that seemed at the time. Huygens also discovered Saturn's largest moon, which he named Titan, and was the first to notice markings on Mars.
Huygens best known as the first great horologist, ... evinced a deeper understanding of the physics of pendulum swings-and the problem of keeping them going at a constant rate-when he built his first pendulum clock in 1656. Two years later Huygens published a treatise on its principles, called the Horologium, in which he declared his clock a fit instrument for establishing longitude at sea.
By 1660, Huygens had completed not one but two marine timekeepers based on his principles. ... Now a recognized authority on the subject, Huygens published another book in 1665, the Kort Onderwys, his directions for the use of marine timekeepers. Subsequent voyages, however, exposed a certain finickiness in these machines. They seemed to require favourable weather to perform faithfully. The swaying of the ship on a storm's wave confounded the normal swinging of the pendulum.
To circumvent this problem, Huygens invented the spiral balance spring as an alternative to the pendulum for setting a clock's rate ...

Robert Hooke
Pg 39:
As a biologist studying the microscopic structure of insect parts, bird feathers, and fish scales, he applied the word cell to describe the tiny chambers he discerned in living forms. ... a surveyor and builder who helped reconstruct the city of London after the great fire of 1666. As a physicist, Hooke had his hand in fathoming the behavior of light, the theory of gravity, the feasibility of steam engines, the cause of earthquakes, and the action of springs.

Hooke and Huygens clash - Here, in the coiled contrivance of the balance spring. Hooke clashed with Huygens, claiming the Dutchman had stolen his concept.

Wounded dog method of finding longitude at sea!!!!!!
Pg 42-43:
Send aboard a wounded dog as a ship sets sail. Leave ashore a trusted individual to dip the dog's bandage into the sympathy solution every day at noon. The dog would perforce yelp in reaction, and thereby provide the captain a time cue. The dog's cry would mean, "the Sun is upon the Meridian in London." The captain could then compare that hour to the local time on ship and figure the longitude accordingly.

This is hilarious now!
One had to hope, of course, that the powder really held the power to be felt many thousand leagues over the sea, and yet-and this is very important-fail to heal the tellable wound over the course of several months. (Some historians suggest that the dog might have had to be injured more than once on a major voyage.)
Whether this longitude solution was intended as science or satire, the author (author of the method) points out that submitting "a Dog to the misery of having always a Wound about him" is no more macabre or mercenary than expecting a seaman to put ot his own eye for the purposes of navigation. "Before the Back-Quadrants were Invented," the pamphlet states, "when the Forestaff was most in use, there was not one Old Master of a Ship amongst Twenty, but what a Blind in one Eye by daily staring in the Sun to find his Way. " ... A few years of such observations were enough to destroy anyone's eyesight.

Magnetic compass method of finding longitude.
Pg 44-45:
The compass needle points to the magnetic north pole. The North Star, however, hovers above the actual pole-or close to it. As a ship sails east or west along any given parallel in the northern hemisphere, the navigator can note how the distance between the magnetic and the true pole changes. ... A chart could be drawn ... linking longitude to the observable distance between magnetic north and true north.

Pg 50:
In the spring of 1714, they got up a petition signed by "Captains of Her Majesty's Ships, Merchants of London, and Commanders of Merchants-Men." This document, like a gauntlet thrown down on the floor of Parliament, demanded that the government pay attention to the longitude problem-and hasten the day when longitude should cease to be a problem-by offering rich rewards to anyone who could find longitude at sea accurately and practicably.

Pg 53:
The actual Longitude Act, issued in the reign of Queen Anne on July 8, 1714, did all these things. On the subject of prize money, it named first-, second-, and third-prize amounts, as follows:
Pounds 20,000 for a method to determine longitude to an accuracy of half a degree of a great circle;
Pounds 15,000 for a method accurate to within two-thirds of a degree;
Pounds 10,000 for a method accurate to within one degree (111km at the equator) ... The fact that the government was willing to award such huge sums for "Practicable and Useful" methods that could miss the mark by many miles eloquently expresses the nation's desperation over navigation's sorry state.

Pg 56:
In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of "discovering the longitude" became a synonym for attempting the impossible. Longitude came up so commonly as a topic of conversation-and the butt of jokes-that it rooted itself in the literature of the age. In Gulliver's Travels, ...

I think in a few centuries to come, the adage "It's not tough as rocket science" would get the same treatment!

Some interesting and lovely Epigraphs:
Pg 61:
Oh! She was perfect, past all parallel-
Of any modern female saint's comparison,
So far above the cunning powers of hell,
Her guardian angel had given up his garrison;
Even her minutest motions went as well
As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison
- LORD BYRON, "Don Juan"

Pg 74:
Where in this small-talking world can I find
A longitude with no platitude?
- CHRISTOPHER FRY, "The Lady's Not for Burning"

Pg 126:
How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock;
My thoughts are minutes.
- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, "Richard II"

In the intermediary chapters the author captures the life of Harrison, the maker of the chronometer, and his tussles with Reverrend Nevil Maskelyne, compiler of Lunar tables for determining the longitudes. The brilliance of Harrison and his claim to the prize money is only stopped by the power of Maskelyne. However, in the end the chronometer succeeds as the mainstay of navigation.

Pg 134:
Maskelyne produced the first volume of the Nautical Almanac and the Astronomical Ephemeris in 1766, and went on supervising it until his dying day. Even after his death, in 1811, seamen continued relying on his work for an additional few years, since the 1811 edition contained predictions straight through to 1815. The others took over the legacy, continuing the publication of the lunar tables until 1907, and of the Almanac itself up to the present time.

Sometimes, time takes away the meaning of certain things that we do it just for tradition's sake.

Pg 138:
Sauerkraut.
That was the watchword on Captain James Cook's triumphant second voyage, which set sail in 1772. By adding generous portions of the German staple to the diet of his English crew (some of whom foolishly turned up their noses at it (it has quite an offensive smell)), the great circumnavigator kicked scurvy overboard. Not only is sauerkraut's chief ingredient, cabbage, loaded with vitamin C but the fine-cut cabbage must be salted and allowed to ferment until sour to be worthy of the name. Practically pickled in brine, sauerkraut keeps forever aboard ship-or at least as long as the duration of a voyage around the world. Cook made it his oceangoing vegetable, and sauerkraut went on saving sailors' lives until lemon juice and, later, limes replaced it in the provisions of the Royal Navy.

Pg 152:
When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day after his birth in 1693, he held martyr status among clockmakers.

Pg 167 - 168:
But Maskelyne's tables not only made the lunar distance method practicable, they also made the Greenwich meridian the universal reference point. ... This homage to Greenwich might have been expected to diminish after chronometers triumphed over lunars as the method of choice for finding longitude. But in fact the opposite occurred. ...
In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., representatives from twenty-six countries voted to make the common practice official. They declared the Greenwich meridian prime meridian of the world. This decision did not sit well with the French, however, who continued to recognize their own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911.

The beauty of this book is that it blends literature, the scientific during that period, and other tid bits with the main theme. Though a 176 page nutshell, it gives a wide variety of information in the most lucid manner. Looking to read the next book of Dava Sobel "Planets".