Longitude

Over the centuries, sailors who lost sight of land had no reliable way to measure their longitude, and lives and national fortunes depended on solving the problem. Dava Sobel tells how John Harrison, an 18th-century English clockmaker at odds with the scientific establishment, set out to build a clock that could keep exact time at sea. His effort to perfect the timekeeper now called the chronometer lasted forty years. Along the way the book offers a short history of navigation, astronomy and clockmaking. Published in 1995, it was adapted as a television series, and an illustrated edition with 180 images followed in 1998.

Andrew Huberman recommended it as one of three books at the end of a course he taught for four years, and it appears on Patrick Collison's bookshelf and on Richard Branson's list of 65 books to read in a lifetime.