The answer lay in always knowing what time it was at an agreed-upon zero-meridian, as well as aboard the ship (by setting the local clock to noon when the sun was directly overhead). Of 1714, in which Parliament promised a prize of $:20,000 for a solution to the longitude problem'' (which would be millions of dollars today). Sobel writes, a particularly disastrous wreck at the Scilly Isles, near the southwestern tip of England, ''precipitated the famed Longitude Act If a ship didn't know how far to the east or west it had traveled, then it didn't know where land was likely to be, and the unexpected contiguity of land hadĪ way of causing ships to sink with a frequent loss of human lives. The inability to solve the longitude problem for so long also had dire consequences. Of the world for the better part of human history.'' In fact, so frustrating was this problem that it came to be thought of as synonymous with impossibility. She concludes, ''This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma - one that stumped the wisest minds
How to remember that it's the latitudes and not the longitudes that are parallel, one trick is to associate the ''a'' sounds in latitude and parallel.)īut the real difference, as the she notes, is that the zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by nature and is the equator, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude is simply wherever science decides to place it (for more thanĢ00 years at Greenwich, England).
Whereas: ''The meridians of longitude go the other way: They loop from the North Pole to the South and back again in great circles of the same size, so they all converge at the ends of the earth.'' (Although Ms. The globe'' in a series of concentric circles that are smaller the farther they are from the equator. Scientific Problem of His Time,'' Dava Sobel writes that ''the trick for remembering the difference'' is that ''the latitude lines, the parallels, really do stay parallel to each other as they girdle Irst, is everyone clear on the difference between longitude and latitude? In her elegant history, ''Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
The Biggest Peril to Ships for Most of History By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT The Biggest Peril to Ships for Most of History
0 kommentar(er)
