Audiobook: Longitude by Dava Sobel
I listened to Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
I wish I had known because all through the listening, I kept wondering at the obvious bias of the writer.
Dava Sobell sets up her story as a struggle between two forces—the mechanical watchmakers and the scientific/mathematic astronomers.
Her hero is obviously John Harrison, the watchmaker who solves the problem of how to figure out longitude but is denied his place in history and the money prize that goes along with it by force after force after force.
Had I known of the full title for this book, I would have been more understanding of the favoritism. As it was, I was trying to pay attention to the history of the longitude problem and couldn’t understand the amount of time spent on Harrison’s life and family. It made the sections where the narrative went away from him feel like unnecessary tangents.
This is a situation when the audiobook adapters really let the author down.
Another failing of this audiobook, or perhaps of the book in general, is that I couldn’t get a real solid sense of the scientific phenomenon and mechanical solutions described in the text. I got the general ideas, but if theorhetical physics can make sense in a work like E=mc2, I want other scientific writers to try for better as well.
Still, I do feel as if I have learned a lot of things I should have already known. If aliens ever came down and asked for an explanation of latitude and longitude, I think I may be able to not completely embarrass myself now.
And if I ever get to London, I’m definitely putting Greenwich on my itinerary. I mean, Harrison’s time pieces allowed Man to treat time as a universal constant (even if it is not). How cool of an accomplishment is that?
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