Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History

This book explores the history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century, revealing the visual, mental, and social concerns that shaped how people understood it. It also sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body, the Board of Longitude, and the cast of characters involved in the search, including famous novelists and artists, pamphleteers, and inventors.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 01 December 2022
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Why does one make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems, and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth's London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth's prints – a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rakes Progress in 1735 – to unravel the visual, mental, and social concerns that entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. Why does longitude appear in novels, smutty stories, political critiques, copyright cases, religious tracts, and dictionaries as much as in government papers? This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body – the Board of Longitude – established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Meet the cast of characters involved in the search for longitude, from famous novelists and artists to almost unknown pamphleteers and inventors, and see how their interactions informed the fate of longitude's most famous pursuer, the clockmaker John Harrison.

Why does one make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems, and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth's London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth's prints – a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rakes Progress in 1735 – to unravel the visual, mental, and social concerns that entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. Why does longitude appear in novels, smutty stories, political critiques, copyright cases, religious tracts, and dictionaries as much as in government papers? This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body – the Board of Longitude – established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Meet the cast of characters involved in the search for longitude, from famous novelists and artists to almost unknown pamphleteers and inventors, and see how their interactions informed the fate of longitude's most famous pursuer, the clockmaker John Harrison.

Dimension: 239 x 163 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781802070538