Abstract

In 1714, the British government passed an act to encourage proposals for methods to discover the longitude at sea. Creating a Board of Commissioners to judge proposals, and offering three large potential rewards for successful ones, this is one of the first examples of state sponsored science. The trials and tribulations that followed for the clockmaker John Harrison have become one of the best-known stories in the history of science. Longitude was an intense and wide-ranging topic of interest and discussion for its day, not just a question of navigation at sea, but of argument, satire and comedy at home. This talk considers why longitude mattered, what people did with it, and what that meant for finding it at sea.