"Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude"
The Toronto Globe and Mail
TELEVISION
PBS tells tale of discovery of longitude with swashbuckling vigour
FINE TUNING
Tuesday, October 6, 1998 JOHN ALLEMANG
It takes courage to put the word longitude in the title of a TV show in this crass age. Most people would be afraid to pronounce it, let alone sit through an hour-long documentary about the man who figured out how to calculate it. But courage is something PBS has no shortage of, and it's thanks to the uncommon sense of the U.S. public broadcaster and its flagship science series Nova that we have the opportunity to watch Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude (PBS at 8 p.m.).
Okay, so they buried the word in the subtitle. When you're going up against Home Improvement and JAG, you have to look for an edge somewhere. Calling the program Lost at Sea at least suggests a little bit of swashbuckling excitement. But the real excitement is more cerebral, in the best PBS tradition. Lost at Sea is a completely engrossing story about the dogged determination of an uneducated carpenter, John Harrison, to solve the greatest scientific problem of the 18th century.
Lost at Sea takes as its starting point a devastating shipwreck off the Cornwall coast in 1707: Thousands of British sailors were lost because no one knew how to calculate a ship's position on the high seas. Latitude was no great problem. Navigators could figure out their north-south by observing the height of the noonday sun or by measuring the length of the day. But longitude was a complete mystery. Once sailors got out of sight of land, they largely went on guesswork.
It was a problem that dominated 18th-century thinking, as the sea became the focus for global expansion and international trade. The closest 20th-century parallel may be the resources the Americans put into the Apollo space program, except that the need to figure out longitude must have seemed much more urgent and pressing. The British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 -- millions in today's dollars -- to the person who came up with a working solution. There was no shortage of crackpots with loony ideas. The contest so transfixed London that it became a topic in William Hogarth's satiric drawings.
Lost at Sea, which is based on Dava Sobel's book Longitude, brilliantly captures the thinking of an age when much-respected mathematics professors could quite seriously suggest that the best solution was to anchor warships at intervals across the Atlantic and have them fire off rocket beacons each night at midnight, it has a sense of humour in dealing with the loopy science that arises, then as now, when there's money to be made from new ideas. And it is also a visual delight with many saltwater scenes shot from rolling decks of a magnificent masted ship -- one glimpse of the moon heaving across the heavens like a ping-pong ball and you realize that it could never work as a reference point for navigators.
But the greatest strength is the show's ability to take challenging scientific thought and turn it into a dramatic story about one man's quest. When the leading thinkers of the period dictated that longitude would be found in the stars -- in spite of the insuperabie difficulties of observing the heavens from stormy seas -- Harrison realized that it was all a question of time. If he could manufacture a clock that would keep precise time on the seas, he could determine through the speed of the Earth's rotation how far a ship was from its home port. The story of Lost at Sea then becomes a tale of building the perfect clock, and when the Prague Symphony isn't supplying spirited 18th-century sinfonia accompaniment, the background noise is of comforting ticks and tocks.
Patrick Malahide, who made a name for himself in Dennis Potter's series The Singing Detective, plays Harrison in scenes that powerfully illustrate the struggle of one man of imagination against the blinkered scientific Establishment. \/Vhat could have been an awkward series of periwigged vignettes is made vivid by Malahide's rough-spoken quotes from Harrison's passionate journals. A man obsessed with accuracy, he had no time for his critics, and his paranoid denunciations are splendid.
The script, energetically narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, is literate without being in any way pompous. There is only one problem. In a show that is so fundamentally about precision -- Harrison's most advanced timepiece lost only 30 seconds in a six-week test voyage to the West Indies -- the word longitude is pronounced two different ways.
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