Time and time again : determination of longitude at sea in the 17th century / Richard de Grijs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

De Grijs, Richard, 1969- author.

Contributor:

Institute of Physics (Great Britain), publisher.

Series:

IOP (Series). Release 4.

IOP expanding physics

[IOP release 4]

IOP expanding physics, 2053-2563

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Longitude--Measurement--History.

Longitude.

Nautical astronomy--History.

Nautical astronomy.

History.

Longitude--Measurement.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (various pagings) : illustrations (some color), maps (some color).

Other Title:

Determination of longitude at sea in the 17th century.

Place of Publication:

Bristol [England] : IOP Publishing, [2017]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader, EPUB reader, or Kindle reader.

text file

Biography/History:

Richard de Grijs has been a professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in China since 2009. He was the founding director (2012-2016) of the East Asian Regional Office of Astronomy for Development, and has held the role of Discipline Scientist (Astrophysics) at the International Space Science Institute-Beijing since 2015. His research focuses on many aspects of star cluster physics, and he is currently also engaged in a number of research projects related to the history of astronomy, with special emphasis on the 17th Century.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

"Version: 20171101"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

Title from PDF title page (viewed on December 11, 2017).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9780750311946

9780750311960

OCLC:

1015235222

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.