Longitude
The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel
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“One of 70 mustread books. | Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and In the Garden of Beasts by @exlarson Longitude & Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel”
Source →“One of 70 mustread books. | Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and In the Garden of Beasts by @exlarson Longitude & Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel”
Source →Recommended by 4 notable people, including Patrick Collison and Richard Branson
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Should I read this?
Recommended by 6 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Science, and History.
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and t...
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Recommended by 6 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Science, and History.
Recommended by notable people
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Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe
“One of 70 mustread books. | Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and In the Garden of Beasts by @exlarson Longitude & Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel”
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Not sure if this is the right fit?
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“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
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Longitude
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