Download or read book Finding Longitude How ships clocks and stars helped solve the longitude problem written by National Maritime Museum and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended for viewing on colour device. Official publication of the National Maritime Museum's “Ships, Clocks and Stars” exhibition.
Download or read book Finding Longitude written by Richard Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Official publication of the National Maritime Museum's exhibition "Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Longitude". 300 years ago, amidst growing frustration from the naval community and pressure from the increasing importance of international trade, the British government passed the 1714 Longitude Act. It was an attempt to solve one of the most pressing problems of the age: how to determine a ship's longitude (east-west position) at sea. With life-changing rewards on offer, the challenge captured the imaginations and talents of astronomers, skilled craftsmen, politicians, seamen and satirists. This beautifully illustrated book is a detailed account of these stories, and how the longitude problem was solved. Highlights of the book include: * Foreword by the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. * Specially commissioned photographs of the National Maritime Museum's collection. * A new description of the collaborations and conflicts in a tale of technical creativity, scientific innovation and hard commercialism. From the same publisher as Dava Sobel's Longitude, Finding Longitude tells a new story of one of the great achievements of the Georgian age, and how it changed our understanding of the world.
Download or read book Ships Clocks and Stars written by Richard Dunn and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of eighteenth-century invention and competition, commerce and conflict, this is a lively, illustrated, and accurate chronicle of the search to solve “the longitude problem,” the question of how to determine a ship’s position at sea—and one that changed the history of mankind. Ships, Clocks, and Stars brings into focus one of our greatest scientific stories: the search to accurately measure a ship’s position at sea. The incredible, illustrated volume reveals why longitude mattered to seafaring nations, illuminates the various solutions that were proposed and tested, and explores the invention that revolutionized human history and the man behind it, John Harrison. Here, too, are the voyages of Captain Cook that put these revolutionary navigational methods to the test. Filled with astronomers, inventors, politicians, seamen, and satirists, Ships, Clocks, and Stars explores the scientific, political, and commercial battles of the age, as well as the sailors, ships, and voyages that made it legend—from Matthew Flinders and George Vancouver to the voyages of the Bounty and the Beagle. Featuring more than 150 photographs specially commissioned from Britain’s National Maritime Museum, this evocative, detailed, and thoroughly fascinating history brings this age of exploration and enlightenment vividly to life.
Download or read book Longitude written by Dava Sobel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." 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. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, 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, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
Download or read book Finding Longitude written by Richard J. Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Official publication of the National Maritime Museum's exhibition "Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Longitude". 300 years ago, amidst growing frustration from the naval community and pressure from the increasing importance of international trade, the British government passed the 1714 Longitude Act. It was an attempt to solve one of the most pressing problems of the age: how to determine a ship's longitude (east-west position) at sea. With life-changing rewards on offer, the challenge captured the imaginations and talents of astronomers, skilled craftsmen, politicians, seamen and satirists. This beautifully illustrated book is a detailed account of these stories, and how the longitude problem was solved. Finding Longitude tells a new story of one of the great achievements of the Georgian age, and how it changed our understanding of the world.
Download or read book Summary of Dava Sobel s Longitude written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-04-30T22:59:00Z with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The latitude and longitude lines govern the world today, as they have for centuries. They were first mapped out by Ptolemy in his first world atlas in AD 150. #2 The difference between latitude and longitude is that 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. To find your latitude, you only need to know the length of the day or the height of the sun above the horizon, whereas to find your longitude, you need to know what time it is aboard ship and the time at your home port or another place of known longitude. #3 The Age of Exploration was when many sailing vessels set out to conquer or explore new territories, and the wealth of nations floated upon the oceans. Still, no ship had a reliable means for determining their whereabouts. #4 The search for a solution to the longitude problem was like finding the Fountain of Youth, the secret of perpetual motion, or the formula for transforming lead into gold. The British Parliament, in its famous Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king’s ransom for a practical means of determining longitude.
Download or read book Longitude written by Dava Sobel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-11-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the forty-year effort of John Harrison to invent the chronometer, the first instrument able to keep accurate time for navigational purposes.
Download or read book Ships Clocks and Stars written by Richard Dunn and published by . This book was released on with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Quest for Longitude written by William J. H. Andrewes and published by Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. This book was released on 1996 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Quest for Longitude is a book for students and for teachers, for collectors and for scholars, and for the thousands of people who, having enjoyed Sobel's Longitude, desire a well-illustrated reference that describes in detail the many fascinating devices and the intriguing characters who, by solving the ancient problem of finding longitude at sea, changed the world forever. 250 illustrations, 120 in color.
Download or read book Time and Navigation written by Andrew Kenneth Johnston and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want to know where you are, you need a good clock. The surprising connection between time and placeais explored inaTime and Navigation- The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, the companion book to the National Air and Space Museum exhibition of the same name. Today we use smartphones and GPS, but navigating has not always been so easy. The oldest "clock" is Earth itself, and the oldest means of keeping time came from observing changes in the sky. Early mariners like the Vikings accomplished amazing feats of navigation without using clocks at all. Pioneering seafarers in the Age of Exploration used dead reckoning and celestial navigation; later innovations such as sextants and marine chronometers honed these techniques by measuring latitude and longitude. When explorers turned their sights to the skies, they built on what had been learned at sea. For example, Charles Lindbergh used a bubble sextant on his record-breaking flights. World War II led to the development of new flight technologies, notably radio navigation, since celestial navigation was not suited for all-weather military operations. These forms of navigation were extended and enhanced when explorers began guiding spacecraft into space and across the solar system. Astronauts combined celestial navigation technology with radio transmissions. The development of the atomic clock revolutionized space flight because it could measure billionths of a second, thereby allowing mission teams to navigate more accurately. Scientists and engineers applied these technologies to navigation on earth to develop space-based time and navigation services such as GPS that is used every day by people from all walks of life. While the history of navigation is one of constant change and innovation, it is also one of remarkable continuity. Time and Navigation tells the story of navigation to help us understand where we have been and how we got there so that we can understand where we are going.
Download or read book Athanasius Kircher the Mysteries of the Geocosmos Magnetism and the Universe written by Agustín Udías and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Illustrated Longitude written by Dava Sobel and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2008-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new illustrated edition of the best-selling Longitude chronicles the tale of the eighteenth-century inventor John Harrison, who created the chronometer and, in the process, saved thousands of lives and great fortunes. Reprint.
Download or read book Time Restored written by Jonathan Betts and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Rupert T. Gould (1890-1948), the polymath and horologist. A remarkable man, Lt Cmdr Gould made important contributions in an extraordinary range of subject areas throughout his relatively short and dramatically troubled life. From antique clocks to scientific mysteries, from typewriters to the first systematic study of the Loch Ness Monster, Gould studied and published on them all. With the title The Stargazer, Gould was an early broadcaster on the BBC's Children's Hour when, with his encyclopaedic knowledge, he became known as The Man Who Knew Everything. Not surprisingly, he was also part of that elite group on BBC radio who formed The Brains Trust, giving on-the-spot answers to all manner of wide ranging and difficult questions. With his wide learning and photographic memory, Gould awed a national audience, becoming one of the era's radio celebrities. During the 1920s Gould restored the complex and highly significant marine timekeepers constructed by John Harrison (1693-1776), and wrote the unsurpassed classic, The Marine Chronometer, its History and Development. Today he is virtually unknown, his horological contributions scarcely mentioned in Dava Sobel's bestseller Longitude. The TV version of Longitude, in which Jeremy Irons played Rupert Gould, did at least introduce Gould's name to a wider public. Gould suffered terrible bouts of depression, resulting in a number of nervous breakdowns. These, coupled with his obsessive and pedantic nature, led to a scandalously-reported separation from his wife and cost him his family, his home, his job, and his closest friends. In this first-ever biography of Rupert Gould, Jonathan Betts, the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Senior Horologist, has given us a compelling account of a talented but flawed individual. Using hitherto unknown personal journals, the family's extensive collection of photographs, and the polymath's surviving records and notes, Betts tells the story of how Gould's early life, his naval career, and his celebrity status came together as this talented Englishman restored part of Britain's - and the world's - most important technical heritage: John Harrison's marine timekeepers.
Download or read book Einstein s Clocks and Poincare s Maps Empires of Time written by Peter Galison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre." —New York Times Book Review A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others.…Galison has unearthed fascinating material" (New York Times). Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time.
Download or read book From Sundials to Atomic Clocks written by James Jespersen and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clear and accessible introduction to the concept of time examines measurement, historic timekeeping methods, uses of time information, role of time in science and technology, and much more. Over 300 illustrations.
Download or read book Mathematics at the Meridian written by Raymond Flood and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greenwich has been a centre for scientific computing since the foundation of the Royal Observatory in 1675. Early Astronomers Royal gathered astronomical data with the purpose of enabling navigators to compute their longitude at sea. Nevil Maskelyne in the 18th century organised the work of computing tables for the Nautical Almanac, anticipating later methods used in safety-critical computing systems. The 19th century saw influential critiques of Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating engines, and in the 20th century Leslie Comrie and others pioneered the automation of computation. The arrival of the Royal Naval College in 1873 and the University of Greenwich in 1999 has brought more mathematicians and different kinds of mathematics to Greenwich. In the 21st century computational mathematics has found many new applications. This book presents an account of the mathematicians who worked at Greenwich and their achievements. Features A scholarly but accessible history of mathematics at Greenwich, from the seventeenth century to the present day, with each chapter written by an expert in the field The book will appeal to astronomical and naval historians as well as historians of mathematics and scientific computing.
Download or read book Celestial Navigation in the GPS Age written by John Karl and published by Paradise Cay Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books on celestial navigation take shortcuts in explaining concepts; incorrect diagrams and discussion are often used for the sake of moving the student along quickly. This book tells the true story-and the whole story. It conveys celestial navigation concepts clearly and in the shortest possible time.It's tailored for navigation in the GPS age-a time of computers, calculators, and web resources. Although it covers all of the traditional methods of 'working a sight, ' the primary thrust is using the (under $10) scientific calculator. By using equations that you key into your calculator, this book guides you toward a better understanding of the concepts of celestial navigation.You will learn novel ways to plot lines of position, ways to check your sextant accurately by star sights, and how to tell what time it is from a moon sight. The many appendices are a treasure of references and explanations of abstract ideas. Celestial Navigation is a crucial skill for the offshore navigator to know, this book provides the shortest path to that knowledge.
