Dava Sobel Quotes

#1. In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of "discovering the longitude" became a synonym for attempting the impossible.

Dava Sobel

#2. The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king's ransom (several million dollars in today's currency) for a "Practicable and Useful" means of determining longitude.

Dava Sobel

#3. Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them - with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.

Dava Sobel

#4. Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of its original inventor, dropped from the consciousness of the seamen who used it every day.

Dava Sobel

#5. The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.

Dava Sobel

#6. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

Dava Sobel

#7. One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.

Dava Sobel

#8. Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork.
Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel