Halley's Quest: A Selfless Genius and His Troubled Paramore - Hardcover

Wakefield, Julie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0309095948 ISBN 13: 9780309095945

Publisher: Joseph Henry Press, 2005

Synopsis

For most people, Edmond Halley is best known for accurately predicting the periodic appearance of the comet that ultimately would bear his name. But his greatest achievement may have been overlookedâ€" indeed few people know that it was Halley who solved the riddle of accurate navigation for all sea-going vessels.

As seventeenth-century scientists gradually came to believe that the inside of the Earth was magnetized they were puzzled by the fact magnetic north not only varied slightly from place to place, but gradually changed over time, suggesting a slow variation of the Earth's magnetic field. But if the Earth was permanently magnetized, how could its magnetism vary? Edmond Halley, Britain's Astronomer Royal, ingeniously proposed that the Earth contained a number of spherical shells, one inside the other, each magnetized differently, each slowly rotating in relation to the others. This brilliant deduction earned Halley the command of a small sailing ship, the 52-foot Paramore, and with it, a royal mandate. Halley was to sail forth “to stand so far into the South, till you discover the Coast of the Terra Incognita.†But more importantly, determine the variation between true and magnetic north in order to more accurately calculate longitudeâ€"a feat that would improve Britain's navigational skills and ensure its dominance of the high seas.

Halley's Quest takes readers on a trilogy of sea voyages, each of which proved to be as novel and revealing as it was difficult and controversial. But more than a yarn of risk and adventure, the story at the core of the book is a deeply personal and intellectual tale that captures the science and the spirit of an almost forgotten episode in the history of navigation. Once branded a heretic by the Church and denied a prestigious scholarly chair at Oxford University, Halley ultimately changed the course of science, producing charts that described more accurate ways to navigate and documenting new geophysical phenomena ranging from ocean patterns to the motion of Jupiter's moons. This delightful book emphasizes the drama of Halley's mission and the passion of an era hungry for the stories science had to tell.

Table of Contents

• Front Matter
• First Voyage 1698-1699: 1 Cast Off
• 2 The Almost-Lovable Paramore
• 3 Battle of the Books
• 4 Trouble on the Pink
• 5 Friendship Royal
• Second Voyage 1699-1700: 6 Outward Bound
• 7 Terra Incognita
• 8 Compass Points
• 9 Chart the Needle
• Third Voyage 1701: 10 Prince of Tides
• 11 Queen Anne's Patronage
• 12 Back to That Comet
• 13 Legacy: More Than a Comet Man
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Plates

About this title

About the Author

Julie Wakefield is an accomplished science writer who has been published in such general interest publications as Smithsonian, The Washingtonian, and City Paper. She has also written for Scientific American, New Scientist, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum. She lives in Washington, D.C.

From Booklist

Edmund Halley is best known for discovering and calculating the period of the comet named after him. Before he was astronomer royal, Halley was a notable voyager in search of confirmation of his theory of Earth's magnetism. His three voyages so dedicated, undertaken in ships smaller than a modern oceangoing yacht, failed to bring confirmation of his theory and, moreover, were much troubled by unruly subordinates, a problem as common in those days as weevils in the bread and algae in the water. Halley survived all three voyages, of course, and returned with the basis for calculating the distance between the geographical and magnetic North Poles, a large boon for accurate navigation and mapmaking. Like Dava Sobel's Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999), this is a useful portrait of one of the people who assembled the vast jigsaw puzzle that is our image of the world we live in. It is also substantially as well researched and as readable as Sobel's popular books. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0309095948
• ISBN 13: 9780309095945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278