to improve marine navigation and “find out the so-much desired longitude at sea for perfecting the art of navigation.” He named John Flamsteed his first Astronomer Royal the same year.
The Royal Observatory is the location of the Prime Meridian. A plane passing through the observatory and through the Earth’s north and south poles will cleave Earth precisely into eastern and western hemispheres. The observatory also serves as the base for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and hence is the location where each day, year, and century begins.
At some point, Harrison’s chronometers were moved from the Maritime Museum across the street, through the park, and up the hill to the observatory. It is ironic for the clocks, at the time of this writing, to reside in the laboratory of the clocks’ greatest critics, the astronomers.
The history of an observatory constructed to solve the problem of determining longitude is fascinating. The chronometers too were constructed to solve the problem of determining longitude and, to me, they are even more spellbinding. Over the years, I have returned to Greenwich four more times to visit them and to pay my respects.
Required by my career field to master aerial and space navigation, I became fascinated with the history of marine navigation. I learned that after Columbus’s return from his first Atlantic crossing, a tremendous jurisdictional dispute over newly discovered lands erupted between Spain and Portugal, the two most powerful maritime rivals in Europe. In settlement, Pope Alexander VI issued the Bull of Demarcation. With aloof equanimity, His Holiness drew a meridian line from north to south on a chart of the great ocean, one hundred leagues west of the Azores. He assigned all lands west of the line, discovered or undiscovered, to Spain, and all lands to the east to Portugal. It was masterful diplomacy, particularly when no one knew where the line fell.
The early ships’ captains understood the meaning of latitude and could measure it in the northern hemisphere by the elevation of the North Star above the horizon. However, none understood the longitude. Magellan’s scribe, Pigafetta, wrote: “The Captain spends many hours studying the problem of the longitude but the pilots content themselves with knowledge of the latitude, and are so proud of themselves, they will not speak of the longitude.” My search for how this navigation problem was solved led, inevitably, to the ingenuity and craftsmanship of John Harrison.
As an avid student of Harrison’s successes and travails, I found Dava Sobel’s Longitude provided many treasures of detail and of relationships previously undiscovered. Those unfamiliar with this unique slice of history will find here a fascinating tale of a remarkable achievement in timekeeping and navigation. Those who are quite knowledgeable on the subject will, I suspect, find some delightful surprises.
Neil Armstrong
April 2005
When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales.
—MARK TWAIN, Life on the Mississippi
Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my schoolroom—the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.
My father strode up Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center with me on his shoulders, and we stopped to stare at the statue of Atlas, carrying Heaven and Earth on his.
The bronze orb that Atlas held aloft, like the wire toy in my hands, was a see-through world, defined by imaginary lines. The Equator. The Ecliptic. The Tropic of Cancer. The Tropic of Capricorn. The Arctic Circle. The prime meridian. Even then I could recognize, in the graph-paper grid imposed on the globe, a powerful symbol of all the real lands and waters on the planet.
Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them—with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.
As a child, I learned the trick for remembering the difference between latitude and longitude. The latitude lines, the parallels, really do stay parallel to each other as they girdle the globe from the Equator to the poles in a series of shrinking concentric rings. 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.
Lines of latitude and longitude began crisscrossing our worldview in ancient times, at least three centuries before the birth of Christ. By A.D. 150, the cartographer and astronomer Ptolemy had plotted them on the twenty-seven maps of his first world atlas. Also for this landmark volume, Ptolemy listed all the place names in an index, in alphabetical order, with the latitude and longitude of each—as well as he could gauge them from travelers’ reports. Ptolemy himself had only an armchair appreciation of the wider world. A common misconception of his day held that anyone living below the Equator would melt into deformity from the horrible heat.
The Equator marked the zero-degree parallel of latitude for Ptolemy. He did not choose it arbitrarily but took it on higher authority from his predecessors, who had derived it from nature while observing the motions of the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, and planets pass almost directly overhead at the Equator. Likewise the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, two other famous parallels, assume their positions at the sun’s command. They mark the northern and southern boundaries of the sun’s apparent motion over the course of the year.
Ptolemy was free, however, to lay his prime meridian, the zero-degree longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through the Fortunate Islands (now called the Canary & Madeira Islands) off the northwest coast of Africa. Later mapmakers moved the prime meridian to the Azores and to the Cape Verde Islands, as well as to Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, Pisa, Paris, and Philadelphia, among other places, before it settled down at last in London. As the world turns, any line drawn from pole to pole may serve as well as any other for a starting line of reference. The placement of the prime meridian is a purely political decision.
Here lies the real, hard-core difference between latitude and longitude—beyond the superficial difference in line direction that any child can see: The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. 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 of the world for the better part of human history.
Any sailor worth his salt can gauge his latitude well enough by the length of the day, or by the height of the sun or known guide stars above the horizon. Christopher Columbus followed a straight path across the Atlantic when he “sailed the parallel” on his 1492 journey, and the technique would doubtless have carried him to the Indies had not the Americas intervened.
The measurement of longitude meridians, in comparison, is tempered by time. To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude—at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty
