Event Description
Following the extraordinary success of Dava Sobel’s Longitude in the 1990s, the story of the British Board of Longitude and the development in the eighteenth century of new methods for finding a ship’s position at sea became closely bound up with that of clockmaker John Harrison.
This was a narrative that, in the words of one journalist, had the power ‘to make the mind race, the chest swell and the heart beat faster’. It made Harrison a celebrated British hero as the archetypical ‘lone genius’, and the rewards offered under the 1714 Longitude Act a model for government-sponsored attempts to encourage innovation.
This talk explores afresh key elements of the commonly repeated narrative. It offers a longer history of state involvement in navigation and exploration in the Georgian era and of the birth and evolution of a group of Commissioners who only became the Board of Longitude decades after the original Act.
Event Information:
Free and open to the public; please visit the event webpage for the event link.
Hosted by the Royal Museums Greenwich.
