"Longitude"

[fiefoe]

Dava Sobel's slim volume is excellent for airport reading.

• Lesser minds devised schemes that depeneded on the yelps of wounded dogs, or the cannon blasts of signal ships strategically anchored - somehow - on the open ocean.
• The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king's ransom for a "Practical and Useful" means of determining longitude.
• Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy.. Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot...  as soon as the admiral collapsed on dry sand, a local woman combing the beach purportedly found his body.. and handily murdered him for (the emerald ring on his finger).
• "dead reckoning": The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how quickly the ship receded from this temporary guidepost.
• Forced to navigate by latitude alone, whaling ships, merchant ships, warships and pirate ships all clustered along well-trafficked routes, where they fell prey to one another.
• Galileo later named these (satellites orbiting the planet Jupiter) last the Medicean stars.
• King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.
• Here, in the coiled contrivance of the balance spring, Hooke clashed with Huygens, claiming the Dutchman had stolen his concept.

There being no mystic communication of clocks
it hardly matters when this autumn breeze
wheeled down from the sun
to make leaves skirt pavement like a million lemmings

An event is such a little piece of time-and-space
you can mail it through the slotted eye of a cat.
                             -- Diane Ackerman