Deva Sobel

The idea of discovering a way to determine longitude at sea at that time was tantamount to attempting Mission Impossible.

People just didn't think it could be done.

It was one of those things you would talk about, like the secret of perpetual motion.

But you didn't really expect it to happen.

The stakes were high, life and death.

So even though everybody considered it Mission Impossible, still there was a sense of, wouldn't it be great if we could do this?

Which offered a fantastic monetary prize to solve this problem of finding the longitude at sea.

The prize was 20,000 pounds.

So you can imagine, this was really worth extending yourself to try to win this.

You got your latitude from the sky.

So why wouldn't you get your longitude?

I mean, it just seemed to make sense.

Astronomy had an entire international network of people working on it.

And then this guy from Yorkshire came along with his clock.

He lived in an unglamorous section of England.

He seems to have been entirely self-educated.

And he achieved things in precision timekeeping that were highly unusual for the time.

What time is it in two places at once?

And that will nail your position.

It's one o'clock here.