Longitude Quotes (2)
Circles to square and cubes to double
Would give a man excessive trouble.
The longitude uncertain roams,
In spite of Whiston and his bombs.
Would give a man excessive trouble.
The longitude uncertain roams,
In spite of Whiston and his bombs.
Alma', Canto III, in Samuel Johnson, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (1810), 203. The reference to longitude reflects the difficulty of its determination at sea, and the public interest in the attempts to win the prize instituted by the British government in 1714 for a successful way to find longitude at sea (eventually won by John Harrison's chronometer). In this poem, William Whiston (who succeeded Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge) is being satirized for what many thought was a crack-brained scheme to find the longitude. This proposed, with Humphrey Ditton, the use of widely separated ships firing off shells programmed to explode at a set time, and calculation of distance between them made from the time-lag between the observed sounds of the explosions using the known speed of sound.
When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?
Hermann von Helmholtz, Edmund Atkinson (trans.), Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects: First Series (1883), 29.
See also: | Accuracy (8) | Church (4) | Discovery (166) | Galileo Galilei (55) | Independent (6) | Measurement (62) | Oscillation (2) | Pendulum (6) | Seaman (2) | Time (55)
