Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude

An illustrated history of an eighteenth-centuury British act of parliament and the heated race to find a ship's precise longitude at sea.

A tale of eighteenth-century invention and competition, commerce and conflict, this is a lively, illustrated, and accurate chronicle of the search to solve "the longitude problem," the question of how to determine a ship's position at sea—and one that changed the history of mankind.

Ships, Clocks, and Stars brings into focus one of our greatest scient...