Time and time again : determination of longitude at sea in the 17th century / Richard de Grijs.
Τύπος υλικού:
ΚείμενοΣειρά: IOP expanding physicsΛεπτομέρειες δημοσίευσης: Bristol : IOP Publishing, c2017.Περιγραφή: 1 ηλεκτρονική πηγή (ποικίλες σελιδαριθμήσεις) : εικ. (μερ. έγχρ.), χάρτες (μερ. έγχρ.)ISBN: - 9780750311946
- 9780750311960
- Determination of longitude at sea in the 17th century
- 526.62 23
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Preface -- Foreword -- 1. Changing times -- 1.1. Enlightenment in Western Europe : the Dutch Golden Age -- 1.2. Intermezzo : The rise of the scientist -- 1.3. Scholarly communication and scientific networks in the 17th century -- 1.4. Birth of the learned societies and their scientific journals -- 1.5. The 17th Century : early modern pinnacle of human ingenuity
2. Global development of mathematical geography -- 2.1. Coordinate systems -- 2.2. Early cartography and mapping -- 2.3. Towards reliable navigation across the open seas
3. Early insights inspired by Galileo Galilei -- 3.1. Galileo's influence -- 3.2. Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock
4. The importance of high-precision timekeeping -- 4.1. Horologium (1658) and beyond -- 4.2. From Horologium Oscillatorium (1673) to new long-range sea trials
5. The long road to a practical marine timepiece -- 5.1. Spring-driven clock developments -- 5.2. Return to the marine pendulum design
6. The merits of horology versus astronomy -- 6.1. The nature of gravity -- 6.2. Newton's early contributions to resolving the longitude problem -- 6.3. Human ingenuity -- 6.4. Developments leading up to the 1714 Longitude Act -- Epilogue. Zero longitude.
Determination of one's longitude at sea has perplexed sailors for many centuries. The significant uptake of world trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries rendered the increasingly urgent need to solve the 'longitude problem', an issue of strategic national importance. Historical accounts of these efforts often focus almost exclusively on John Harrison's role in 18th-Century Britain. This book starts instead from Galileo Galilei's late-16th-Century development of an accurate pendulum clock, which was first achieved in practice in the mid-17th-Century by Christiaan Huygens in the Dutch Republic. It is primarily based on collections of letters that have not been combined into a single volume before. Extensive introductory chapters on the history of map making, the establishment of the world's reference meridian at Greenwich Observatory, and the rise of the scientific enterprise provide the appropriate context for non-expert readers to fully engage with the book's main subject matter.
