Reddit mentions of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Latitude is relatively easy. Longitude, not so much. Good narration: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYE66/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend Longitude by Dava Sobel.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYE66/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

There is an excellent book I read called Longitude that tells the story of that guy. Absolutely one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read and I cant recomend it enough if you have even the smallest intrest in what Harrison did.

Of course this only works if you know exactly when noon is where you're at. When you're at port that's easy enough. When you're at sea, not so much. The quest for an accurate clock for navigation was a huge deal during the Age of Sail. In fact in 1714 England's Parliament offered a prize of up to £20,000, the equivalent today of millions of dollars.

Dava Sobel has written a fascinating book about it called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

There's also a documentary about the longitude problem up on YouTube (in 21 parts)

http://youtu.be/T9dso7ATlSk

I read this book, Latitude, by Dava Sobel (which I highly recommend as well as any other Dava Sobel book) which talks about how hard it was to nail down where you were longitudinally. After reading it, I saw an old map like this one and it all clicked. You'll notice that, generally, on maps that pre-date some dude (I won't ruin the book for you), the north-south orientation is pretty accurate, and only the east-west orientation is skewed.

I haven't looked at an old map the same ever since.

I read Longitude while reading M&D. A fantastic book that provided a lot of background...

I don't want to be an adult anymore. Seriously. This sucks. I had to deal with car insurance shit after a small car accident last week and then it turns out my brothers doctor screwed up his records and didn't do a follow up blood test my brother needed. All this while waiting to hear back about a crappy part time job I'm hoping to get. On top of this, my aunt called my mom this morning and said some truly aweful things which caused a huge fight and gave me a terrible case of adjada.

If I win, this ebook looks pretty interesting.

Thanks for the contest!

1. Longitude by Dava Sobel
   
   
2. 8/10... so far
   
   
3. Nonfiction, History, Science
   
   
4. An entertaining book about the history of how to accurately measure longitude while traveling at sea. I haven't actually finished it yet but I've read a good portion and feel confident about recommending it to others. Also, if you don't normally read nonfiction you should give this one a shot as it's both entertaining and a quick read, less than 200 pages.
   
   
5. Amazon link

Map of the world shower curtain

Scratch Map if she travels

Maybe a book of interest?

You may be confusing issues. (latitude, altitude, longitude)

Sailors wanted an accurate way to know the "time at port" to compare against local time (observable via stars or sun) so that they could compute their longitude (east or west location on the globe). (The difference in minutes would be equivalent to the relative difference in minutes of arc east/west.)
Grandfather clocks (eg, pendulum clocks) wouldn't work for this, because the rocking of the ship would throw off the pendulum timing.

If I recall from the documentary based on Dava Sobel's book [Longitude(Amazon)] (http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Dava-Sobel-ebook/dp/B003WUYE66/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395258934&sr=8-1&keywords=longitude+dava+sobel) (looks like the documentary is available on youtube), the guy (John Harrison in 18th century) who rose to the challenge to make a clock that worked at sea had all sorts of problems with the pendulum motion, and somehow miraculously actually made a "pocket watch" to solve the problem.