Our reading experiences are enhanced and enriched through our members’ different perspectives.

Griffin Bay Book Club invites all readers and book lovers to join our discussions.

Please join us on Friday night, February 28, 7:00. She is the author of such noted works as: The Planets, Gallileo’s Daughter, and A More Perfect Heaven. In her four decades as a science journalist she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni. In 2000 Longitude, adapted by Dava Sobel and Michael Sturridge as a four-part series, made a splash as a movie for TV, and starred Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons.ĭava Sobel is an accomplished writer of science and scientific topics. She packs her story with a brief history of astronomy, navigation, clock making, and then gives us glimpses of heroism, chicanery, ruthlessness, rivalry, and ambition surrounding the lure of the Longitude Prize. His compact chronometer, practical and elegant, was a triumph he eventually earned the prize offered by the Longitude Board, thanks to the recognition and influence of the King, George III.ĭava Sobel makes the “greatest scientific problem” of the era not only accessible but also dramatic and suspenseful. John Harrison’s invention, an accurate chronometer, a watch that would keep accurate time at sea, was the result of four decades of experimentation. The person who claimed the great Longitude Prize-solving the unsolvable-was a self-educated clockmaker and carpenter. In 1714 the British government set up a Board of Longitude, and announced prizes worth millions in today’s currency “for such person or persons as shall discover the Longitude.” Discovering the way to calculate longitude was therefore a great objective for nations with commercial and military endeavors on the high seas.

Without longitudinal calculations many ships became lost, especially during long voyages. The problem of longitude had long been considered unsolvable by the best scientists of the time, even Isaac Newton. In Longitude, well-known science writer, Dava Sobel, delves into the problems mariners faced by not knowing how to track longitude, or the east-west position of ships at sea. This month Griffin Bay Book Club will discuss the fascinating story of the “lone genius,” English clockmaker John Harrison, inventor of the Marine Chronometer.

Book longitude sobel