The Clockmaker's Longitude Apprentice
A Novel of the Longitude Prize

About this book:

In the fog-choked lanes of 1730 London, a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison walks into George Graham's prestigious clockmaking shop carrying a wooden escapement that keeps time to within a second a month—without oil, without friction, and without a single precedent in the annals of horology. He has come for the Longitude Prize: twenty thousand pounds offered by Parliament to anyone who can solve the greatest navigational nightmare of the age. The scientific establishment, led by the Astronomer Royal, insists the answer lies in the stars. Harrison knows it lies in a machine that can defeat the rolling deck, the freezing salt air, and the treachery of temperature itself.

Fourteen-year-old Ned Ward, apprentice to London's finest watchmaker, is handed over to this unlettered genius as a drudge and spy. In a freezing loft above the Minories, amid the resinous stink of lignum vitae and the scream of steel on brass, Ned watches a man reinvent timekeeping from first principles: epicycloidal teeth cut by hand, balances that cancel a ship's motion like opposing pendulums, a mechanism that breathes with the wood's own oils. But the Board of Longitude is a fortress of admirals, bishops, and Cambridge dons—and they have already decided that no mere artisan can outwit the heavens.

From the workshops of Fleet Street to the rolling decks of the *Centurion*, *The Clockmaker's Longitude Apprentice* follows the twenty-year obsession that rewrote the map of the world. It is a novel of sweat and geometry, of a boy learning to see the invisible architecture of motion, and of a stubborn carpenter who refused to accept that the sea could not be tamed by clockwork. For readers of *Longitude* and *The Island of Sea Women*, here is the human story behind the machine that shrank the ocean.