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,
“... recounted by Dava Sobel. Rather, her hero, the ‘lone genius’ of her ostentatious subtitle, is John Harrison, a dour Yorkshire carpenter and village choirmaster who spent half a century from the early 1720s trying to make clocks capable of determining longitude and to convince metropolitan grandees that he had done so. Kendall’s watch was a faithful copy ... ”