A&E: What is Longitude about?

Dava Sobel: The story is about the struggle to come up with a means of
determining one's position at sea, which was something that people had
been trying to do for hundreds of years. 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, it became
imperativ r these ships to know where they were. So the book and this
film are about the search for longitude.
A&E: As children, most people learn about the imaginary lines that
circle the globe. Latitude lines run east to west, and longitude lines
run north and south. Besides the direction, what is the difference
between latitude and longitude?
DS: The hard-core difference between latitude and longitude is this: The
laws of nature fix the zero-degree parallel of latitude, the equator,
while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like sands of time.
In 150 AD, when the cartographer and astronomer Ptolemy plotted the
lines of latitude and longitude on his first world atlas, the equator
marked the zero-degree parallel of latitude. This was not an arbitrary
decision. He chose it based on observations made by his predecessors.
While observing the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, they
discovered that these heavenly bodies pass almost directly overhead at
the equator. So it was a fixed position.
However, the measurements of longitude meridians, in comparison, are
tempered by time. As the world turns, any line drawn from pole to pole
may serve as well as any other for a starting line of reference.
Therefore, Ptolemy was free to lay his prime meridian, the zero-degree
longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through what is
now called the Canary & Madeira Islands. However, throughout history the
placement of the prime meridian was a purely political decision. Later
mapmakers placed the prime meridian through Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem,
St. Petersburg, Paris, and Philadelphia, among other places, before it
finally settled down at last in London. Therefore, zero-longitude is not
a fixed position, and this difference is what makes finding latitude
child's play and turns the determination of longitude, especially at
sea, into an adult dilemma.
A&E: If knowing one's longitude, especially at sea, is a necessity, how
were early explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and
Sir Francis Drake, to name a few, able to successfully navigate the seas
without this knowledge?
DS: For lack of a practical method of determining longitude, every great
captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best
available charts and compasses. They all got where they were going by
forces attributed to good luck, or to the grace of God.
Also, any sailor worth his salt can gauge his latitude well enough by
the length of the day, or by the height of the sun. Christopher Columbus
followed a straight path across the Atlantic when he "sailed the
parallel" on his 1492 journey, and the technique would have carried him
to the Indies had not the Americas intervened.
A&E: So, how does longitude work?
DS: To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is
aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known
longitudeâ at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the
navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation.
Since the earth makes a single revolution every 24 hours, a line of
longitude goes through 360° in 1,440 minutes. Simple division,
therefore, allows us to calculate that one degree of longitude equals
four minutes of time the world over, or 15 degrees every hour.
Each hour's time difference between the ship and the starting point
marks a progress of 15 degrees of longitude either east or west. Those
same 15 degrees of longitude also correspond to a distance traveled. At
the Equator where the girth of the earth is greatest, 15 degrees can
stretch 1,000 miles, but north or south of that of that line, the
mileage value of each degree decreases. So precise knowledge of the hour
in two different places at once was a necessity. This information, so
easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches, was utterly
unattainable during most of our planet's history.
And the consequences were horrible. If you didn't know where you were,
and you didn't know how far away you were from the coastline, it often
happened that ships would sail right into the rocks, and all the men
would be drowned. Or there was the opposite problem, in which ships
might zigzag back and forth across the ocean for weeks until everyone
had died of scurvy or thirst, when they were only a few miles away from
shore. It was such a huge problem for so many centuries that the
solution to the longitude problem assumed legendary proportions, on a
par with discovering the Fountain of Youth, and virtually every European
government was offering prize money to whoever could figure out a way to
determine longitude at sea.
A&E: This must have served as an open invitation to as many disreputable
as reputable theories.
DS: Definitely. Surely the most colorful of the offbeat approaches was
the wounded dog theory. It was based on a quack cure called powder of
sympathy. This miraculous powder could purportedly heal at a distance.
All one had to do to unleash its magic was to apply it to an article
from the ailing person, and this would hasten the closing of the wound.
The cure was so painful that the patient, no matter how far away, would
scream from the pain. In keeping with this idea, one would 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, of course, yelp in reaction and thereby provide the captain a
time cue. The captain could then compare that hour to the local time on
ship and figure out his longitude.
A&E: Interesting. How did Britain become the main powerhouse behind
finding a solution to the longitude problem?
DS: British merchants and seamen united and demanded that the government
find a solution to this problem. They called for a committee to consider
the current state of affairs and requested a fund to support research
and development of promising ideas. They also set the highest bounty of
all-time by naming a prize equal to a king's ransom or several million
dollars in today's currency, thus inspiring someone to do it and do it
right.
The members of the Board of Longitude were under orders to act quickly.
Scientists at the time favored an astronomical solution, so palatial
observatories were founded in Paris, London, and Berlin for the express
purpose of determining longitude by the heavens. Renowned astronomers,
frustrated by their lack of results, appealed to the clockwork universe.
Men such as Sir Isaac Newton, by then a grand old man of 72, and his
friend, Edmond Halley, of comet fame, were approached to help. Newton
went over the existing methods for determining longitude and said that
all of them were true in theory, but difficult to execute. This was a
gross understatement. Newton suggested a watch, but the only clocks
available were big pendulum clocks, and this would never do at sea
because the minute the ship starts rocking, that's the end of your
clock. On the deck of a rolling ship, such clocks would slow down, or
speed up, or stop running altogether. And even more of a problem was the
change in temperature. As a shipped sailed from a cold country, like
England, to a warm destination like the West Indies, the clock's
lubricating oil thinned or thickened and made its metal parts expand or
contract with equally disastrous results. All these factors could cause
a clock to gain or lose time, so that idea was abandoned and the search
for an astronomical solution continued.
A&E: So Harrison did not come up with the solution to the longitude
problem?
DS: The solution was actually found by Harrison, but astronomers also
found it. Except their solution was unwieldy. It required so much
education and so much time to make it work, that it was an unpractical
solution.
A&E: How did Harrison find out about the award?
DS: No one knows when or how Harrison first heard word of the longitude
prize. One would imagine that Harrison grew up well aware of the
longitude problemâ just as any alert schoolchild nowadays knows that
cancer cries out for a cureâ and that there's no good way to get rid of
nuclear waste. Longitude posed the great technological challenge of
Harrison's age.
When Harrison did learn of the contest, he was already very interested
in precision time keeping. He had started building clocks before he was
20, and he was known for having made the best available clocks on land,
at that point. So it occurred to him that with slight modifications, he
could make a clock work at sea. He really devoted his life to this
project. Once he got involved in solving the longitude problem, that was
all he did forever more.
A&E: Harrison's solution was brilliant, but the scientific community was
not willing to embrace his result over that of one of their peers. Why
were they so unwilling to recognize his achievement?
DS: Harrison had many things going against him. He hadn't been
university educated, so there was a prejudice against him for being
outside the university system. He was just a self-educated clock maker.
He was a person of not high birth, and he was from an area of England
that gave him rather an identifiable accent. People saw him as a rough
country type. They didn't perceive him as the fine precision engineer,
which he was.
Then there was the Board of Longitude charged with awarding this huge
20,000 pound prize. Everyone on the board was an astronomer or an
admiral. There were no clockmakers on this board. Harrison was the last
person imaginable and therefore, no one wanted to give him the prize
because nobody understood the magnitude of his achievements. The board
also wasn't expecting the solution to be a clock. In fact, Newton, who
had been the first head of the board, had said, "This problem will never
be solved by a timekeeper." And here Harrison had this elegant little
machine, which none of the astronomers understood, so they were very
opposed to it. All of these prejudices worked against Harrison.
A&E: But Harrison did succeed.
DS: Yes, he did. With no formal education or apprenticeship to any
watchmaker, he nevertheless constructed a series of virtually
friction-free clocks that required no lubrication and no cleaning. They
were made from materials impervious to rust, and that kept their moving
parts perfectly balanced in relation to one another, regardless of how
the world pitched or tossed them about. Harrison was a mechanical
genius. And his story is so remarkable because he stepped into a field,
dominated by giants. People like Galileo, DaVinci, Isaac Newton. And yet
he was the one who succeeded.
A&E: Eventually Harrison did receive the prize money. What events took
place that allowed him to finally receive his just reward?
DS: Harrison was an old man when he received his reward. While working
on his last clock, H4, Harrison's age began to affect him. He couldn't
really see or fine tune well enough anymore to do this kind of work. The
board now headed by his archrival, Maskelyne, would change the rules of
the contest to favor the chances of astronomers whenever they saw fit.
They kept requesting more sea trials, more proof, and Harrison was
exhausted. He was too old to keep doing what they still were demanding.
Early on Harrison had made one voyage, and he was horribly sick the
whole time. His son, William, who helped him in his workshop, started
conducting the sea trials, and I have a feeling he [Harrison] was only
too happy to turn over the field tests to his son.
It was a very unfair situation, and yet you can see it from both sides.
I mean, Harrison had done it, but the board had to make sure that this
solution was absolute. The board's reluctance to acknowledge Harrison's
achievement is what forced him and his son to appeal to King George III.
This brings the story to a whole other dimension. The fact that they
actually had a private audience with the king is truly remarkable.
Anyway, they got King George interested enough that he tested the clock
himself, found it reliable, and decided to champion their cause. He
appealed directly to the prime minister and to Parliament for "bare
justice." With the government on their backs, the longitude
commissioners finally decided to give Harrison an award. Not the grand
prize, but half of the money due him. The sum was a bounty awarded by
the benevolence of Parliament, in spite of the Longitude Board, instead
of from it. Actually, no one ever received the coveted grand prize
money.
A&E: In England the story of Harrison and his clocks is well known, but
most people in North America don't know the story. How did you become
interested in this little known piece of history?
DS: I got interested in this story because I was invited to attend a
symposium at Harvard University celebrating the 300th anniversary of
Harrison's birth. I remember chuckling when I got invited because it
sounded like such a strange, esoteric event, and I really knew nothing
about the subject. But once there, I was captivated by the quality of
the event and the story itself. You don't think there's anything to
those lines on maps and globes. They just appear to be some kind of
background grid. But then you realize that for a long time they
represented life or death and that there is a very involved, compelling
history to being able to figure it out. Even in our time, the lines of
longitude and latitude govern with more authority than you realize. For
as the world changes its configurationâ with continents adrift across the
sea and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn due to war or peaceâ these
lines stay fixed.
A&E: While doing research for your book, did you ever go to Greenwich to
see the original clocks?
DS: I have been to visit the clocks. In fact, when I started the book, I
didn't think I would be able to see them because they're in England. And
I was here [in New York] writing this very small book for a small
publisher with a vanishingly small advance, and there was no way I could
afford a trip to England. Then my brother, who got so interested in the
book, said to me, "You really have to go there and see the clocks. It
will be a different book if you do. And if you can't afford to go, I'll
send you." So I went.
By the time I left for England, I'd seen the clocks in pictures. I'd
seen films and cartoon animations of the mechanisms, so I really knew
them. But once in their presence I realized that I hadn't seen them. I
was just stopped by them because first of all, they're exquisitely
beautiful, and second, they work. You don't expect that. H1, the first
clock not only works, but it moves. It looks like a moving sculpture. So
it's thrilling to look at it.
The clocks are also very cleverly displayed. You can push a button that
lets you hear inside the case. So you can hear them, too. And they make
the most wonderful noises. It's not anything as simple as a tick-tock,
but a marvelous whirling mechanical sound, and you get a sense of their
complexity.
A&E: When you first read Charles Sturridge's adaptation of your book,
were you pleased?
DS: I was totally pleased with the script and the way the story was
translated into a film format. Friends of mine asked me all along,
"Well, don't you want to write it yourself?" And I said, "God, no." I
wouldn't know the first idea how to write a screenplay. But luckily they
didn't ask my opinion or advice and just did it brilliantly themselves.
The acting is superb. And it's really fun to see my book on the screen.
For so long Longitude was my weird little story that no one was going to
read, so for me there is a sense of disbelief about it all.
A&E: In the film, Rupert Gould, the man who discovers Harrison's
abandoned clocks and decides to restore them, is prominently featured.
However, your book devotes only a few pages to his story.
DS: Yes, in my book, Gould comes in for about two pages, maybe three
pages, at the very end of the story. He's in the last chapter. And it's
a very touching part of the book, but it is not the book. It was Charles
Sturridge's great insight to realize that the way to make this story
work for a modern audience was to have a modern figure that was more
human featured in the story. We don't know a lot about Harrison or his
emotional life. We do know that he was married twice and had three
children, but mostly we know him as a workaholic who spent 40 years
building the clocks. This fact is an amazing piece of perseverance, but
it wouldn't be interesting to watch on television.
Also, the original story would have been very hard to tell in a movie
format because it unfolds over centuries. So the trick was to find a way
to make Longitude livelier. And Gould, a naval vet, who after suffering
three nervous breakdowns and a scandalous divorce turns to restoring the
broken clocks as a means to restoring his broken emotional health. Now
that was a movie.