Dr. Johnson, Zachariah Williams, and the Eighteenth-Century Search for the Longitude

Abstract

One of the fascinating problems during much of the eighteenth century in England was the effort to ascertain the longitude at sea. Attracted by a huge prize in money offered by Parliament, a great many people, among them famous mathematicians and astronomers, common artisans and hopeful cranks, sought for a solution to the problem.' The state of the matter at mid-century is reflected by the Gentleman's Magazine. In its August 1752 issue it announced that it would henceforth publish no more silly or dubious proposals, of which it had had many lately. Some of these, it complained, were in Hebrew or other mysterious characters, some in algebraic equations where neither the name nor the value of the terms was expressed, and some were put forward on totally wrong principles, as in mistaking or confounding absolute and relative time. However, it would, it assured readers, continue to print proposals worthy of public notice on this matter of utmost importance for navigation.2 And indeed the magazine had given liberal space to proposals on the longitude. Two years earlier in publishing An Essay for discovering the Longitude by the Variation of the Compass, it appended a note to claim possible priority for another, yet unpublished, theory on the magnetic variation of the compass and to seek further details about it. The note states: