Fred's Book Club: Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

Greetings, book fans! Welcome again to our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers, called so because of the day of the week on which it falls (Hump Day), not because of any actual hunchbacks. We might have called it the Full of Woe Writers, but knowing writers as I do, I think that might have been a little too on the nose. Alas!  

Today's author should not be full of woe anyway. Dava Sobel accomplished a number of things with this book, giving us a brief and riveting history and becoming a best-seller that has remained in print since first publication in 1995. I refer to Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. 

This is the tale of John Harrison, a clockmaker in the 18th century who invented the first accurate chronometer that could be used at sea. This was a huge deal -- while latitude could be calculated from the sun at noon, longitude could only be calculated if one knew the time at a fixed point (like the ship's point of origin) at a known time aboard (such as noon). As Sobel writes, "Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees. And so each hour's time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude east or west."  

And therein lay the problem: "Precise knowledge of the hour in two different places at once -- a longitude prerequisite so easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches -- was utterly unattainable up to and including the era of pendulum clocks." A pendulum is more useless on a rolling ship than I am. So Parliament offered a prize of up to £20,000 to the inventor who could solve this vexing problem. Harrison not only solved it -- he solved it five times, each of his chronometers getting better and smaller as he progressed.

Fascinating, especially since he came out of nowhere: "Harrison started out as a carpenter, spending the first thirty years of his life in virtual anonymity before his ideas began to attract the world's attention." Not unlike Jesus in that regard. As a youth hungry for knowledge, Harrison borrowed a textbook on natural philosophy and made his own copy of it by hand. And clocks seemed to compel him early on:

Harrison completed his first pendulum clock in 1713, before he was twenty years old. Why he chose to take on this project and how he excelled at it with no experience as a watchmaker's apprentice, remain mysteries. Yet the clock itself remains. Its movement and dial -- signed, dated fossils from that formative period -- now occupy an exhibit case at The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers' one-room museum at Guildhall in London.

      Aside from the fact that the great John Harrison built it, the clock claims uniqueness for another singular feature: It is constructed almost entirely of wood. This is a carpenter's clock, with oak wheels and boxwood axles connected and impelled by small amounts of brass and steel. Harrison, ever practical and resourceful, took what materials came to hand, and handled them well. The wooden teeth of the wheels never snapped off with wear but defied destruction by their design, which let them draw strength from the grain pattern of the mighty oak. 

It's hard to escape the idea that Harrison became obsessed with the longitude project. It took him five years to build his first sea chronometer, H-1, and three years for the second, H-2. When he set forth to build the third sea chronometer, H-3, it took him nineteen years. Sobel points out in the text that this was five more years than the Statue of Liberty from conception to building, five more years than the carving of Mount Rushmore. But hey -- those great monuments didn't require things like an innovative friction-free design! 

Sobel's book is not long, and every page is fascinating. She goes through the history of time measurement and sea exploration in short order to bring us to the problem of longitude, and studies how the single-minded Harrison attacked the problem with a perfectionism that seemed to admit no end to the amount of time available. Every page of the book has some beguiling detail on the man, the mechanisms, and the history. And later editions, like the 2005 one above, also include a foreword by Neil Armstrong, worth reading on its own.

Harrison did eventually get some money out of Parliament, but the whole prize was never awarded to him or anyone. Maybe it would have been if Harrison had been a big name like Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, but Harrison was little more than the autodidact whose genius was matched by his persistence. We've seen that sort of expectation again. It was, after all, Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian who was supposed to solve the problem of powered flight, not a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Ohio. 

If you heard of John Harrison and his clocks after the year 1995, it's probably because of this book. In addition to the number of prizes it won, and a large illustrated version that followed, a dramatic television series with Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons aired in 2000. 

Harrison would have been surprised but probably pleased by this belated popularity. Sobel writes, "When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day from his birth in 1693, he held martyr status among clockmakers." She notes that by 1860, when the Royal Navy had fewer than 200 ships, it owned almost 800 sea clocks. Harrison's idea of using clocks for longitude at sea had taken over so thoroughly that the man himself had returned to obscurity -- until Sobel's book made him famous.

I can't recommend the book enough to people who like a good popular history book. There is a reason this one has been so popular in the last quarter century -- it's a terrific science history and a ripping good yarn.