When I lived in London my dad came to visit and convinced us to go to Greenwich. We have seen the observatory museum but we were quite disappointed. It was not bad, for charity, but a lot for children. Then came the famous square where the statue that indicates the meridian we saw a little house. I asked about, was the home of the astronomer royal, then transformed into a museum. Upon entering, it was love at first sight. It tells the story of longitude, to calculate the difficulties, attempts, partial solutions, and the history of clocks. I fell in love, and the bookshop dad gave me the famous book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. I started reading a very short time later, but I did not understand much and I let it go. In fact it is full of technical terms, and is not an easy read in the original language.
Indiana Dad is fond of mathematics, astronomy, strange mechanisms and lots of other things that I do not understand. For this reason, Indiana uncle always gives a lot of books on mathematics, astronomy, and other mechanisms strange things that do not understand. When I saw her on the library "Longitude" in Italian, I decided to try again.
The book tells the story of the calculation of longitude, which ends with becoming the history of modern watch, and their inventor, Harrison. The story is beautiful, but the book does not bear comparison with the museum in Greenwich. Come back from the museum was gasatissima: I learned a lot of interesting technical details, I understand how the various clocks Harrison, and I saw with my own eyes his genius. The book, however, tells the story very well, but it runs too much on the more technical part. I could say that "tells" the genius of Harrison, but not the shows. Some illustrations and a small appendix on the operation of the clocks would make the story very more compelling in my opinion. I realize that probably the author is not an expert, but writing something like, "Harrison decided to use diamonds to the cut-out" without explaining what it means and what is the escapement of a clock seems a bit 'useless.
In any case, I found a very good book, I just think that maybe, if the author had seen the museum in Greenwich before writing it (she herself admits to be gone in a second time) would have been even better.
PS: I just discovered that there is an illustrated version of the book, from what I understand is only available in English, can be found on Amazon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment