Longitude - The Quest for east and west
John McCormick
- Region:
- Anywhere
- Notice Period:
- Emergency (maybe less than one week's notice)
- Type:
- Hobby
- Fee:
- Paid: 75
- Category:
- Science
- Updated:
- 6th October 2021
It’s 1714. The inability to accurately measure longitude has been a scourge of global maritime exploration for over 200 years. The British Government creates the Longitude Prize, several million pounds in today’s money for anyone who can solve the problem. They create a governance body, the Board of Longitude, a collection of the great and the good, to fairly and equally adjudicate it. Mr. John Harrison creates a maritime chronometer that easily beats the Board’s accuracy criteria. Surely that will allow him to win the prize and claim the money. Won’t it?
Views: 651 | Enquiries: 3About John McCormick
I've recently retired and one of the things I'm looking forward to is to spend more time speaking and telling stories. I regularly give talks in my local village in the Cotswolds, the fabulous Hook Norton. These talks have ranged from the history of Bletchley Park to the Apollo space programme, to the history of flight to the story of how they solved how to measure Longitude. I'm happy to give these talks to other groups, or to research and then speak on a topic of interest to groups.
Other Talks on SpeakerNet by John McCormick
- Crossword puzzles, Bombes, Colossus and the birth of modern computing
- The Race to the moon - The US manned lunar exploration programme
- The Wright Brothers to Concorde in 60 years. Crikey!
- Are computers really that smart? Or do we just make them look smart?
- Nothing - why zero is so important in Mathematics
- Wall Paintings - a picture really is worth a thousand words
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