The longitude question

This essay discusses the National Maritime Museum exhibition Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Longitude whose 2014 timing marks the 300th anniversary of the 1714 Longitude Act. The exhibition presents the story of longitude: the problem, the answers proposed, and longitude's solution and at-sea testing. Longitude was a significant navigational, astronomical, and geographical problem, its solution a matter of political and public concern. The exhibition illustrates how longitude's working-out in the eighteenth century brought together the worlds of science, technology, commerce, politics, personal credibility, and the public. It affords an opportunity to reflect not only upon how such matters, vital in their interconnectedness in the past, may be presented effectively to the modern public but also upon the association of science, technology, research, funding, and public engagement in the contemporary context. Ships, Clocks and Stars is at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, until January 2015 before going on tour to the United States and Australia.