"Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude"
The Press Democrat by Bill Mann
PBS takes right turn with 'Longitude'
The rollout of new TV series continues apace. This week also marks the return of an old PBS friend: Acclaimed science show "Nova" launches its 25th season at 8 p.m. Tuesday on KQED-TV, Channel 9 (a quarter century is almost an eternity in TV.) Sailors, scientists and Anglophiles will love this season opener.
"Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude" is based on author Dava Sobel's best-selling book, "Longitude." She's interviewed here.
"Longitude" tells the remarkable story of John Harrison, an uneducated British carpenter who spent 43 years perfecting an accurate timepiece that could be used to determine longitude, the east-west position on the earth's grid.
Latitude could easily be measured using the sun or the North Star. But for centuries mariners didn't know their precise location unless they knew their longitude. When four British ships foundered in 1707, the government put up a reward of 20,000 pounds - several million bucks- in-today's-money for the solution to the longitude problem.
Some prize-seekers tried cumbersome, even loony astronomical methods, but Harrison knew a reliable clock set to the time of the home port would make it easy to calculate longitude, based on the difference between port-time and solar time wherever the ship happened to be.
But clocks of the time were notoriously inaccurate, and Harrison (played here ably by British actor Patrick Malahide) set out on his ingenious and arduous quest, eventually discarding three large prototypes in favor of a small, highly accurate pocket watch. The inventor had to fight off several other challengers to his rightful claim. It took the personal intervention of King George III to finally get Harrison, by then an old man, his pIiZe.
This engrossing story of an ingenious and persistent individual is well-told. Give yourself latitude (and time) to watch Tuesday's "Nova."
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