LONGITUDE
How a Lone Genius stopped us from getting lost at sea, and changed the world!
In school, there was an easy way score a few points on our Geography test.
How do you measure longitude?
Answer: a chronometer.
Done. Move on.
Oh boy! That stupid, sure-shot question, it turns out, was one of the greatest practical problems to ever face mankind!
Dubbed as “the longitude problem”, here it is in a nutshell: You can easily determine your latitude — just wait till the sun reaches its highest point, determine the angle from the horizon to the sun, do basic math — boom.
But where you are on an east-west line? What do you look at? Stars? They change positions daily. Planets? What if it’s overcast?
The answer eluded humans for a thousand years. Heavyweights like Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Cassinni, Christiaan Huygens, Newton, and Edmund Halley tried to answer it, scratched their heads, and failed.
Think about it — the stuck-up dude who invented Calculus to describe the irregularities in the motion of the moon, or the man who told us our place on the solar system couldn’t tell you his own position on the open seas!
That’s really so insane to fathom.
To be sure, cartographers from Ptolemy in AD 150, to Columbus’s trusted peers in 1492, were constantly perfecting maps of continents. (King Louis XIV once lamented that he was losing more territory to his damn astronomers than to his fiercest enemies.)
But better maps simply did not matter. As soon as sailors lost the sight of land, it was anyone’s guess where they were.
Mythical figures like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, Ferdinand Magellan and even Sir Francis Drake were all, in truth, “winging it”. Sheer luck and good weather!
As sea trade grew, ignorance became costly. Much worse, it became unbearable. Thousands of lives and millions in wealth were lost each year. Shipwrecked, stranded, simply lost — starved to death, crushed by waves, uprooted by storms, slowly swallowed up by beriberi, hacked by pirates — demise came in many forms, grim and merciless.
In 1714, England’s Parliament offered millions of dollars to anyone who could solve the problem. Spain, Italian city-states like Genoa, France, Portugal, and the Dutch — all made similar hefty offers in desperation.
Of course there was no shortage of proposed solutions. Legendary sailors like Captain William Bligh or Captain James Cook (before the Indian tribes in Americas cooked him up), tried some of the most promising methods — to little avail. Lesser intellectuals suggested more bizarre solutions, including taking along a wounded dog, which would yelp on cue whenever someone on land would dip a cloth soaked with its blood in a solution of the miraculous ‘’powder of sympathy’.
None came close to a real solution. Faith in astronomy — thought of the most superior of sciences — was conspicuously falling short.
Instead a newcomer engulfed that void — the rather disdained field of chronometry. And the man behind it was an English woodworker, John Harrison. Fittingly poised for a perfect irony, he was entirely untrained in science.
Perhaps he could distance himself from the latest scientific fad, Harrison’s stroke of genius was this: while society looked up to the heavens, obsessed by somehow pin-pointing the perfect objects to “follow” at sea, he dared to imagine a mechanical solution — a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no crude timekeeping device had ever been able to do on land. A chronometer.
His long, forty year quest — obsessive, dogged, forlorn — stands as one of the greatest scientific pursuits. His story, hardly ever mentioned in classrooms, also stands as a silent testament to human ingenuity.
How did society thank him? By ignoring him, of course. Britain’s Board of Longitude — a panel of scientists, naval officers and government officials — had no time for lowly mechanics. After decades of humiliation and struggle, Harrison received only a portion of the prize money.
Yet, his genius invention — a pendulum-free clock that required no oil and carried the true time from the homeport to any remote corner — changed the world forever.
This is his story. And the story of our earliest attempts at GPS: the chronometer.
