The Imperfectionists

Chapter 4Collective Intelligence

A Clockmaker, a Prize, and a King

On the evening of October 22, 1707, 2,000 British seamen lost their lives when four warships ran aground on rocks near the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. The result of a navigational error, this widely publicized human tragedy significantly raised consciousness in Britain about the “longitude problem,” the most urgent and elusive scientific challenge of the day.

Without being able to establish longitude, a geographic coordinate that specifies the east–west position of a point on the surface of the earth, captains of ships had had to rely for centuries on what they called “dead reckoning” (steering by gut instinct). “Every great captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best available charts and compasses,” writes Dava Sobel. “From Vasco de Gama to Vasco Nunez de Balboa, from Ferdinand Magellan to Sir Francis Drake—they all got where they were going willy-nilly, by forces attributed to good luck or the grace of God.”¹

All that was to change in July 1714, when Queen Anne gave her royal assent to an Act of Parliament that offered a reward up to £20,000 (a whopping £1.5 million in today's money) to anyone who could solve the longitude puzzle to an accuracy to half a degree, or plus or minus three seconds a day.

The first Longitude Board, which oversaw the prize, included the esteemed Sir Isaac Newton, who stated categorically that he expected a solution to come from what he called ...