Longitude is a brief book that explains with very easy words why knowing on which longitude were you located was such a technological feat on the XV century and the historical events that came to the solution using very precise and reliable clocks aboard the ships.
In the age of atomic clocks connected to the Internet and computers that routinely check if their local times are correct it seems difficult to believe that having a clock able to miss less than 5 minutes per day was such a difficult and expensive task.
The book describes how most of the people thought it was impossible to manufacture those very precise mechanical clocks and the race between the clockmasters and the people that thought that the solution was on a better understanding of the sky. The governments were pouring lots of money because not knowing with precision your longitude causes a lot of problems on the sea. It happened something similar to the space race and the consequence is that we got to know a lot better our universe.
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