In 1714, Parliament offered a staggering reward - £20,000, equivalent to millions today - for solving the longitude problem at sea. This is William Hobbs's attempt to claim it. Writing with the confidence of a man convinced he's cracked one of navigation's greatest puzzles, Hobbs presents a spring-driven timekeeping device that he argues can maintain accurate time aboard a rocking ship, allowing sailors to calculate their east-west position by comparing local noon with the time at a reference meridian. The text reads less like a finished treatise and more like an urgent proposal - part technical manual, part patent application, part plea for patronage. Hobbs guides readers through setting his device in motion, reading its indexes, and performing the celestial calculations that would determine position. Whether his mechanism actually worked remains part of history's footnotes, but this document captures a pivotal moment when clever inventors across Europe raced to solve the problem that John Harrison would eventually crack with his marine chronometer decades later. For anyone curious about the messy, competitive reality of scientific discovery, this is a front-row seat to the longitude race.
