Measuring Longitude at Sea - Taylor Observatory

Description

In 1700 how did a ship at sea determine its exact longitude? The answer: It wasn’t possible. As a result ships and cargo were too frequently destroyed by crashes into land. Many sailors lost their lives -- 2000 in a tragic accident on the night of October 22, 1707, exactly 309 years before our lecture. The longitude measurement problem was a famous science challenge of the 1700’s and early 1800’s. In 1714 the British Parliament offered a £20,000 prize for a workable solution – millions of dollars in today’s currency. Would astronomy provide the answer as it did for latitude reckoning? Galileo, Newton and others thought so. Or was there a different answer? Fascinating schemes materialized in competition for the prize, some of them bizarre. One method involved subliminal communication between injured dogs. Tim Gill describes the ultimate answer to the longitude problem in his discussion of this compelling historic topic.