num_pages: 168
description: "Nineteenth-century European astronomers tried for decades to explain the variations in their careful astronomical observations. But where the best minds in Europe failed, an intellectual upstart from America succeeded. In 1891 Seth Carlo Chandler Jr., an actuary for a Boston insurance company with no formal education in astronomy, shocked the international scientific community by announcing that he had solved the problem and that an inexpensive instrument he had designed could detect the variation. Another American, Simon Newcomb, compounded the Europeans' embarrassment. Working at the U.S. Naval Observatory Newcomb validated Chandler's findings and reconciled the difference between his observations and accepted theory." Chandler's discovery, dubbed "the Chandler Wobble," had profound significance to astronomers of the time and later played an important role in space exploration and the development of the revolutionary Global Positioning System (GPS). The authors, a father-daughter team of scientists, tell the story of Chandler's life and scientific works with the aid of private correspondence, documents, and family photographs. In recounting both the historical and dramatic human aspects of the story, they help readers appreciate how Chandler's achievements gave America credibility in the world of serious scientific research.
language: English
title: Latitude: How American Astronomers Solved the Mystery of Variation
titlecomplete: Latitude: How American Astronomers Solved the Mystery of Variation
ratings_count: 6
publisher: Naval Inst Pr