Our Trusty Friend the Watch
Simon Schaffer, 31 October 1996
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time
by Dava Sobel.
Fourth Estate, 184 pp., £12.99, August 1996,1 85702 502 4 Show More
by Dava Sobel.
Fourth Estate, 184 pp., £12.99, August 1996,
“... worships’, because ‘he assured us he seldom did anything without consulting it.’ The giant King of Brobdingnag had a different perspective: Gulliver must ‘be a piece of Clockwork (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection)’. Any acute 18th-century reader of Swift would easily make sense of these timely jokes. Britain was then ... ”