Throughout history, explorers, navigators and sailors have needed and sought devices that enable them to "carry the time" with them and to know where they are at all times. Sobel opened her WEP lecture by describing how latitude can easily be worked out on land or at sea through the movement of the sun and stars. However, working out longitude any given time proves to be more elusive.

"Because the Earth is always spinning, there is nothing that stays still in the heavens as a pointer for longitude," she noted. "The whole trick to being able to determine your longitude is to know what time it is in two places at once—where you are and also at a place of known longitude. That was very hard to do for most of human history. In fact, it was impossible, and it's alarming to think that the entire age of exploration was carried out without anyone ever knowing where they were."

John Harrison: the longitude problem solver

The remainder of her keynote covered a broad span of history from the "Age of Sail" in 1571 A.D. up through modern time and our reliance on navigational tools like the Global Positioning System (GPS) and smartphones. Sobel spoke about various historical figures, including John Harrison, the subject of her first book "Longitude."

Following the Scilly naval disaster of 1707— regarded as one of the worst disasters in British naval history that resulted in the loss of four warships and 1,300 sailors—the British government created the Longitude Act of 1714, offering £20,000 (roughly $12 million in today's money) of prize money to anyone who could solve the longitude problem. Harrison eventually won the money after many sea clock prototypes and a long battle with the Board of Longitude and the scientific elite of the day.

'The whole trick to being able to determine your longitude is to know what time it is in two places at once—where you are and also at a place of known longitude. That was very hard to do for most of human history,' noted best-selling author and 2019 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) speaker Dava Sobel during her WEP keynote lecture. Photo by Khulud Muath.

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Sobel outlined how the self-educated English carpenter-turned-clockmaker's groundbreaking research eventually solved one of the most vexing issues of the 18th century: how to determine a ship's longitude at sea. Harrison's lifework would go on to save countless lives at sea.

"Harrison had to prove that his clock could be replicated before he could claim the prize money...Several new additions to the Longitude Act were passed, and one of them stipulated that Harrison would have to build two more timepieces exactly like this to prove that the design could be copied by others," Sobel explained. "The Board of Longitude was actually the world's first research and development agency, and they were empowered to make grants to people who had promising ideas."

"Harrison got so wound up in his fight with the Board of Longitude that he was never able to carry out a final design. He had a plan for a regulator clock that he said would be accurate and would not lose more than one second in 100 days and it would run for a 100 years without maintenance—a claim which seemed laughable, completely ridiculous at the time—and he never had time to build it," she told the audience.

Neil Armstrong, the famous astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon, was an admirer of John Harrison, the self-educated English clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer and figured out how to determine a ship's longitude at sea. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Sobel also spoke about Neil Armstrong, the famous astronaut and aeronautical engineer and the first man to walk on the moon—a man who also greatly admired Harrison and his work.

"This year we will be observing the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing...and Armstrong appreciated John Harrison long before I came along to write my book," Sobel said. "In fact, when he came back from the moon, and he and his fellow astronauts made their world tour. When they visited the British Prime Minister's residence in London, Armstrong offered a toast to John Harrison as being the person who started them on their journey."

'The future is in our hands'

Sobel maintains that the fate of humanity lies squarely in our hands and the sustainable use of our technologies.

'The future is in our hands,' best-selling author Dava Sobel told the KAUST audience during her 2019 Winter Enrichment Program keynote lecture on campus. 'The planet will get along very well without us if we make it an unlivable place, but for the sake of our own prosperity, that is where we have to put our attention now.' Photo by Khulud Muath.

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"Yes, we have more and more technology, and we know less and less, and more taking the technology for granted," she said. "I find this—that in the U.S., the dependence on technology is tremendous, but at the same time there is an outspoken disregard for science as though the one had nothing to do with the other.

"The future is in our hands. The planet will get along very well without us if we make it an unlivable place, but for the sake of our own prosperity, that is where we have to put our attention now."

"Nowadays of course nobody needs a clock because we all have GPS on our phones. We know exactly where we are at every moment. We know where we're going. A voice will tell us, 'Turn left, turn right,'" Sobel continued. "But if you think about it, the GPS works on a system of orbiting satellites—so you could think of those as man-made stars. And then satellites are broadcasting time signals from atomic clocks, so the GPS really is the perfect marriage of the two rival systems from the 18th century. It's delightful to think to think what the Board of Longitude would have made of that suggestion."

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