Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud. Book 34 of 2022 (Clocks for sea navigation)

 

I picked this book up in the gift shop in the Museum of Arts and Technology in Paris.  It is a biography of Ferdinand Berthoud, the leading designer and maker of clocks for ships in the second half of the 18th century. 

Most ships had accurate techniques for establishing latitude, their position north and south. But east and west position could only be determined with accurate clocks on a voyage that began at a known position. Berthoud made this possible with clocks that would keep time nearly perfectly for weeks and even months. 

He lived a long life that saw him become the marine clock maker of the King of France, survive the Revolution, and be honored for his service by the Emperor Bonparte before his life ended at the age of 80.   

The book is written in middle school French. I had to struggle with many words in the vocabulary of navigation and clock making, but I learned a lot about navigation. Accurate clocks were the only way a ship could be sure of its longitude when sailing across open ocean.  




First 33 books of 2022:

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough


The Life of the Mind
 by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen



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