Longitude by wire : finding North America /
Richard Stachurski.
- ix, 239 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-234) and index.
Prologue : plundered corpses -- Only one hassler for the coast survey -- Station buttermilk -- Station head and horns -- The elusive longitude -- Real men in the way of science -- The lightning wire -- Astronomers without ears -- Following the lightning wire -- Finding North America -- Transatlantic hubris -- Heart's content -- Voodoo longitude -- Around the world in sixty years -- Epilogue : Hertzian waves.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, even the most experienced mariners were still risking catastrophe when navigating the North American coastline, because they lacked accurate navigational charts. The various means available to chart makers of the era to measure longitude, both celestial and terrestrial, could be off by thousands of feet -- often deadly for ships. In 1807 the U. S. Coast Survey was created to map the coast accurately and reduce the costly and deadly toll of shipwrecks, a challenge that would take the better part of a century to overcome. This is the tale of discoveries made by American scientists as they worked to solve this life-threatening quandary and develop a precise method of measuring longitude. It recounts how the successful coupling of precision chronometers with the new electrical technology represented by Samuel Morse's telegraph produced the solution to the longitude problem. The use of the telegraph by scientists of the U.S Coast Survey to communicate time signals reduced the probable error in longitudinal measurement to less than ten feet. The "American method," as it was deemed, quickly revolutionized observational astronomy and every other branch of science that depended on recording the precise time of an event.