Looking for longitude : a cultural history
Katy Barrett (Author)
Why make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the 18th century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth's London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth's prints - a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rake's Progress in 1735 - to unpick the visual, mental and social concerns which entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body - the Board of Longitude - established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea
eBook, English, 2022
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2022