Take the Long Way Home

With my trip to London pending, and all the recent buzz about London and the Olympics on television every day, I have been thinking about how easy it is (finances excluded) to get across the pond! If you've got the money and the time, it really only takes about 10 hours of flying time - non-stop!

But it was not always so! I was watching "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" last night, and I just love the part when Walter Raleigh tells the Queen of his voyages to the New World, sailing for months across the ocean, nothing else in sight, and then one day you might possibly see a faint line, a stain on the horizon. You may hope, dare to dream that you see LAND! Clive Owens' delivery is breath-taking!

Sailors had a very difficult time finding their way across the seas, an almost impossible time not getting lost, were it not for the stars and the moon. There are no other points of reference, and so without the sextant, you were doomed. A degree wrong could have you, over the long haul, miles and miles away from your destination.
But, then one day, there was JOHN HARRISON, a self-educated English clock maker, who invented the marine chronometer! This ingenious and all-important device was the key to solving the problem for accurately establishing longitude at sea, which revolutionized the possibility of safely crossing long distances over the water!

Of course, before Harrison, there was Amerigo Vespucci and then Galileo, but they were more absorbed in theory. By the 18th Century, however, there were several tremendous disasters at sea due to errors in reckoning. One of the worst featured the loss of four ships of the British Naval fleet in 1707. Motivated by this terrible tragedy, the British goverment established a prize, through the Board of Longitude, awarded to the first person who could solve the problem!

Harrison was rewarded in 1773, but chronometers continued to be very expensive to produce, and the lunar method hung on for years. Actually it was not until the 20th Century that the wireless telegraph put an end to the watching and calculating from the moon. Also, as there is no natural starting point for longitude, a reference had to be established. While most countries established there own capital city as the reference, it was not until 1884 that the International Meridian Conference chose Greenwich in London as THE point for reference for the world. It is the universal prime or zero point of longitude.

I have stood on that line in Greenwich, and put one foot on one side, one foot on the other. I had the world at my feet!