The Nautical Almanac And Astronomical Ephemeris For The Year 1770

Author : Katy Barrett
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1802070974
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (2 download)

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Download or read book Looking for Longitude written by Katy Barrett and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth’s London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth’s prints – a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rake’s Progress in 1735 – to unpick the visual, mental and social concerns which entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. Why does longitude appear in novels, smutty stories, political critiques, copyright cases, religious tracts and dictionaries as much as in government papers? This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body – the Board of Longitude – established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Meet the cast of characters involved in the search for longitude, from famous novelists and artists to almost unknown pamphleteers and inventors, and see how their interactions informed the fate of longitude’s most famous pursuer, the clockmaker John Harrison.