Longitude

Longitude

The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Dava Sobel

Measuring Trust

Precise measurement creates infrastructure for distant trust.

Beyond this potential for human suffering, the global ignorance of longitude wreaked economic havoc on the grandest scale. It confined oceangoing vessels to a few narrow shipping lanes that promised safe passage. ... Since the sacrifice of a single one of these cargo vessels caused terrible losses, merchants yearned to avoid the inevitable. They wished to discover secret routes—and that meant discovering a means to determine longitude.