The Discovery of Longitude

People knew how to find their north-south position even before we had the idea of "latitude." But once people lost sight of land, they didn't have reliable way of figuring out how far east or west they'd gone - how to measure their longitude.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry. So. Recently, because
I had just spent three weeks researching the Doctor's Riot

(00:22):
and then the Battle of Blair Mountains and then the
Tulsa Race riot, I asked on Facebook for suggestions of
things that were happier talk about. Yeah. Yeah, that's a
lot of heavy content to be dealing with. It was,
and among the suggestions that we got were down winders,
which are the people who lived downwind of the fallout
from nuclear weapons tests. Also the Holocaust. Also the ps

(00:47):
General Slocum, which burned up and led to the deaths
of more than a thousand people. Someone suggested a mass lynching,
and someone else suggested the Irish War of Independence, in
which more than two thousand people die at including more
than seven hundred civilians. So what this tells me is
we either have lots of comedians among the listeners or

(01:07):
a lot of really dark people in terms of their
outlook on life. Well, we are all good ideas, they're
just not what I was asking for at all. We
did get many that were a little happier, and Randy,
on the other hand, asked us to talk about longitude,

(01:27):
and he followed it with eight exclamation points. And so
that story has clocks and science and an inventor and shipwrecks,
but mostly preventing the shipwrecks. So that seemed like an
awesome place to start in terms of doing something a
little happier. Um, of course, as things often go, it's
not actually a completely happy story, but it is not

(01:49):
so devastating as some of my recent research, and certainly
not as devastating as the Holocaust or a mass lynching. No.
So uh. Just about everybody probably remembers uh from elementary
school that we measure coordinates and locations in longitude and latitude.

(02:10):
These concepts have been around at least since Ptolemy's time,
and around the year one fifty he created an atlas
that used a grid of lines both to mark the
maps and to index all of the places in them.
People have also known how to find their north south
position even before we had the idea of latitude. The
Phoenicians were doing it as early as six d BC.

(02:32):
Most techniques for doing this involve measuring the height of
heavenly bodies from the horizon at a specific time, and
we'll link to some step by step instructions on how
to do this and show notes for curious people. Rather
than trying to explain it to you right now. That
would be uh, some knowledge I would like to have. Well,
I was originally typing it into these notes and it

(02:53):
got extremely long. Yeah, anytime you get into directions on
how to do things, it can spiral out of control
in a hurry. Additionally, a few seafaring people's had some
other tricks for figuring out roughly where they were on
the globe, like observing the flights of birds and the
patterns of waves. However, is a general rule once people
lost sight of land, they didn't really have a reliable

(03:15):
way of figuring out how far east or west they'd gone,
in other words, how to measure their longitude. It's also
applied basically anywhere you could lose sight of familiar landmarks.
So even though we're talking about the ocean today, it
also that's the same rule applied with deserts or mountain
ranges that hadn't been explored. Um uh, and it led

(03:38):
to some problems Besides the obvious inability to answer the
question where are we? Also unanswerable word do we have
enough to eat until we get to where we're going
at the rate we're traveling? Uh? And for sea travelers,
are we about to run into anything? That last one
is especially important. It led to a lot of maritime

(03:59):
does masters as ships ran aground on reefs and land
masses that people knew were there but didn't know we're
right there. We've talked about those in some of our
previous episodes, and this problem was particularly the case starting
in the late fifteenth century, as more and more ships
tried to travel across oceans instead of just sticking along coastlines.
You couldn't even rely on your best guests and a map,

(04:22):
as people you know, started making maps of all this
unexplored area, because most of the maps were wildly inaccurate
in terms of their longitudinal measurements. Anyway to put the
sea monsters in the wrong place. Yes, Most of the
methods that people tried for figuring out how to measure
longitude hinged on one question, which was what time is it?

(04:47):
So when you're traveling east, local time moves ahead an
hour for each fifteen degrees of longitude that you travel,
and the opposite is true for every fifteen degrees that
you move west. So if you have a reference time
that you can use as a starting point, you can
figure out what time it is where you are now,
usually using the sun, and you can compare the difference

(05:09):
between those two times to calculate your longitude. Dutch mathematician
Gemma Frigius proposed using a clock to keep an accurate
reference time all the way back in fifteen thirty, but
no clock at that point was actually accurate enough to
do the job, not even a clock that was sitting
on land, and at sea clocks were even less accurate
because the motion of the ship interacted with the motion

(05:30):
of the clock's pendulum, and changes in temperature and humidity
could also mess up the inner workings. Galileo got in
on the action in sixteen thirteen, and he was using
the eclipses of Jupiter's moons as a reference point rather
than just starting with an ordinary clock. His big, big
idea was to make eclipse charts that sailors could use

(05:51):
at sea, but he was never really satisfied with the
accuracy of the charts that he put together, and then
in sixteen sixty seven, Cassini built on the work of
both Galileo and phrasiasts to prove that the basic ideas
at least were in fact sound. First, he measured the
eclipses of Jupiter's moons from a position in Paris, and

(06:13):
then he went to the island of Gory in the
West Indies and measured them again, comparing what time they
occurred in Gory to what time they were predicted to
occur in Paris. And the speciment was pretty accurate, but
even so it was not really practical to use it
on a ship. The telescopes at the time were too unwieldy.
The ship really needed to be perfectly still to be

(06:35):
able to observe and measure the eclipses accurately. Plus timing
the eclipses themselves still required an accurate clock, like just
counting one one thousand was not going to be accurate enough. Uh,
and an accurate clock was still a problem. And running
parallel to all of this scientific work, nations recognized how

(06:58):
important it was to the merchants and their naties to
be able to measure longitude, so they started offering incentives
for people to solve this problem. Philip the second of
Spain offered a prize to whoever could figure it out
in fifteen sixty seven, and still up the third did
the same. In England and France both started observatories in

(07:19):
the late seventeenth century and their goal was to use
astronomy to navigate. The use of astronomical charts, sex stints
and the position of the Moon to determine longitude became
known as lunars um. Although this was really difficult to
do and for a long time until astronomers worked out
some irregularities with the moon's motion, it was also not accurate.

(07:44):
So eventually a maritime disaster really launched England into a
bona fide effort to solve this problem. And we're going
to talk about that after a quick word from our sponsor.
Let's do a lot of great minds have been pondering
for a very long time about how to solve the
launch team problem. And then in October of seventeen o seven,
Admiral their cloud Asy shovels fleet was shipwrecked off of Sicily.

(08:09):
Four ships were driven into the rocks thanks to high
winds because their measurements were off from their actual positions.
More than two thousand men were lost, and the quartermaster
of one of the ships was the only survivor. This
wreck is usually cited as one being mostly due to
the longitude problem, and two as being the thing that

(08:31):
really got Great Britain to focus on solving it. It
was definitely an immense loss of both property and life. However,
to some degree it was also a little bit of
a scapegoat. The incorrect measurements were actually farther off in
terms of latitude than they were in terms of measuring
the longitude. An Admiral Shovel was a highly decorated and

(08:52):
experienced admiral. Nobody wanted to blame him for the disaster,
so longitude really got the thing or of blame, regardless
of how much longitude really was responsible for what happened.
Parliament passed the Longitude Act in July of seventeen fourteen,
which read, in part, whereas it is well known by

(09:13):
all that are acquainted with the art of navigation, that
nothing is so much wanted and desired at sea as
the discovery of the longitude for the safety and quickness
of the voyages, the preservation of ships, and the lives
of men. And whereas, in the judgment of able mathematicians
and navigators. Several methods have already been discovered, true in theory,

(09:34):
though very difficult in practice, some of which there is
reason to expect, may be capable of improvement, Some already
discovered may be proposed to the public, and others may
be invented hereafter. So the Longitude Act goes on to
say that discovery would be of particular advantage to Great Britain,
but that it's also difficult and expensive, and so it

(09:55):
names several people as Commissioners of Longitude, and it sets
a cash prime is for a practical and exact method.
It was ten thousand pounds to within one degree, fifteen
thousand pounds UH to two thirds of a degree, and
twenty thousand pounds if it could be as exact as
within half of a degree. And this method had to

(10:16):
be proven out while in a six week voyage to
the East Indies. In terms of a clock. To be
able to earn this grand prize, the clock could not
gain or lose more than three seconds a day, since
that would add up to two minutes or half a
degree over a six week trip. The Commissioners of Longitude
later became the Board of Longitude and this board drew

(10:39):
from scholars and military minds. It included three professors of
mathematics from Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the Astronomer
Royal and the President of the Royal Society. Also included
were the First Lord of the Admiralty, the First Commissioner
of the Navy Board, and the Speaker of the House
of Commons simultaneously. A lot of people really thought this

(11:00):
was a fool's errand, and a lot of the suggestions
that came in were completely cockamami like. For example, someone
suggested that they stationed ships at regular intervals all over
the ocean where they could use lights and noise to
provide guide points. Um. There was also a really wacky
theory that had to do with complete pseudoscience and involved

(11:21):
wounded dogs and a bandages. It was really strange um
and very silly, and a lot of people started using
discovering the longitude as a synonym for doing something completely impossible.
Many many clockmakers and scientists had tried to make a
clock that could keep accurate time at sea. At this point,

(11:44):
they had tried springs, they had tried vacuum sealed chambers,
in all manner of other techniques and technology to try
to protect the clock from motion and from the elements,
and some of them had actually met with limited success.
They kept good time in fair weather and relatively smooth seas,
but one thing. Once things got wet and rocky, they
started to falter in their accuracy. The man who made

(12:06):
this all work finally was John Harrison. We know almost
nothing about Harrison's childhood or early life, or about his
personal life outside of his clockmaking. He was born on
March twenty four, sixtee and he was the oldest of
five children. In seventeen eighteen, he married a woman named
Elizabeth Barrell, and they had a son the next summer.

(12:28):
She died when the boy was six, and he remarried
a woman named Elizabeth Scott. They went on to have
two more children, and their marriage lasted for fifty years.
Harrison learned to be a woodworker from his father, and
he had no formal training making clocks. Most of his
other education was self taught with the help of books
he borrowed, and he was only twenty when he made

(12:51):
his first pendulum clock, almost entirely from wood. It's really
unclear how he figured out how to do this, considering
that he had no background in work uh and his
family wasn't well enough off to a four o'clock, and
there were no known clockmakers living anywhere near where he
grew up, So it's a little hazy where he got
this information and knowledge. It reminds me a little bit

(13:12):
of Benjamin Bannaker, who he talked about him making a
clock after he took apart a pocket watch that somebody
had loaned to him. Harrison built two more wooden clocks
over the next few years, and by seventeen twenty he
developed a reputation for being really good at making clocks.
He had a knack for figuring out ingenious ways to
improve on existing technology. He was afraid of rust, so

(13:35):
he used brass instead of iron or steel, instead of
relying on lubricants. All the clocks at this point really
had to be lubricated to make their inner workings go.
He tried using woods that secreted their own oil to
make the gears out of He also designed his wooden
gears so that they used the grain of the wood
to make them stronger. And since pendulums expand and contract

(13:59):
with changes in temper sure, which makes the clocks inaccurate,
he used combinations of metals that expanded and contracted at
different rates and canceled each other out ingenious. I know,
it's just you love hearing about someone who just has
so many insights into ways to solve problems. I'm pretty

(14:19):
sure when we put this episode on our Facebook, somebody's
gonna put the Aliens guy on the thread. That's fine,
I love the Aliens guy. Uh, We're not sure when
Harrison heard about the Longitude Prize, but later in life
he noted noted that it was on his mind. By
sevente he had already tackled some of the obstacles that
threw off clocks at sea, most particularly the lubricating oils

(14:43):
that got thicker and thinner depending on the weather. So
his clocks that ran without it had a leg up already,
and he just needed to figure out how to compensate
for the motion of the ship. His first attempt became
known as H one, and this was a big, heavy,
blocky brass thing with four files on the front that
showed hours, minutes, seconds, and the day of the month.

(15:04):
The whole thing worked without any lubrication, and in place
of a pendulum, it used these bar shaped balances that
were connected by springs, and they canceled out the motion
of the ship. This design drew high praise from Edmund Halley,
who was on the Board of Longitude at the time,
and it was approved to be sent on a test
voyage to the East Indies. The Admiralty didn't send it

(15:27):
on the voyage for more than a year, though, and
they sent it to Lisbon instead of the East Indies,
and on top of that, the captain died shortly after arrival.
Even so, the h one proved to be more accurate
than the ship's master's reckoning of their position, and soon
after Harrison arrived back in England in June seventeen thirty seven,
the Board of Longitude convened for the first time since

(15:49):
its inception to discuss his invention. So success yea, but
instead of jumping at the prize money, Harrison said he
wanted to make his invention better. He asked two more
years to work on a smaller, improved version, and he
also asked for five hundred pounds to subsidize his work.
The Board also agreed that on the next test voyage

(16:11):
some other qualified person could accompany the clock. Because Harrison
had been profoundly sea sick during the Lisbon voyage. That's
not fun. That's not a fun way to live. I
hate se sickness. I empathize. I don't know anybody that
loves it, but when you're really prone to it, my
understanding is that it's really quite non delightful. Uh. Harrison

(16:32):
presented the H two so his second version in January.
It was heavier and bigger, and it used circular balances
instead of the bar shaped ones, which compensated for the
ship's motion even better than the first version. But Harrison
still thought he could improve on it, so he spent
the next nineteen years on the H three. When he

(16:53):
finally finished, he was really satisfied that it would do
the job. Like his old pendulums, the H three used
two medals to counteract one another's expansions and contractions. The
clock also needed no lubrication, and both of the innovations
that he used to achieve this still exists today, the
metal in the form of bimetallic strips that are used

(17:15):
in thermostats, and the lubrication free workings in the form
of caged ball bearings that are still used in all
kinds of machines. His resulting clock was also lighter and smaller,
but it did have a really really large number of
moving parts. And yet there's more. A few years earlier,

(17:37):
a watchmaker named John Jeffreys had made Harrison a pocket
watch using Harrison's specifications and bimetallic components. Harrison hadn't thought
at all about using anything so small and portable to
keep time on a ship, but Jeffrey's pocket watch kept
time extremely well, so Harrison decided to make another time
piece that looked more like a pocket watch. Yeah, at

(17:58):
this point, little pocket watches were not They were not
very accurate, and they're pretty fiddly, and they had to
be wound every day. They had a lot of downsides,
and so he had never thought about trying to do
it that way, But after getting this gift, he did,
and the resulting H four was finished in seventeen fifty nine.
It weighed only three pounds and it measured five inches across,

(18:22):
so too big and heavy to really be carried in
a pocket, but it looked a lot like a pocket watch.
It definitely was much much smaller and nimbler than the
other versions he had made. This did come with some tradeoffs, though,
Unlike the earlier models, it did require lubrication, and it
needed to be wound every day, and required some regular

(18:44):
maintenance and cleaning to keep it running. But it's portable,
and you also read it just like you'd read a
regular clock, and as was proved on a voyage, it
was more accurate than required for the twenty thousand pound
grand prize. However, he did not immediately rebend lots of
prize money because there was drama. The Age four went

(19:07):
on a test voyage to Jamaica, which, as we referenced
before the break, it passed with flying colors, but the
trial was thrown out on a technicality. Harrison was supposed
to use the eclipses of Jupiter's moons to to confirm
the longitude in Jamaica, and he didn't do that. He
didn't know that he was supposed to do it. He

(19:27):
wound up getting it like a smaller sort of consolation
prize that would make me her rumph uh. Meanwhile, to
other two astronomers, Neville Mascaline and James Bradley, the latter
being the astronomer royal on the Longitude Board, had been
in pursuit of the prize through lunar methods. As we
talked about earlier. Unlike Harrison, they both had formal standing

(19:51):
and a presence in the academic community. They and others
advocated strongly for a lunar solution to the longitude problem,
not a mechanical and when Bradley died, his replacement, Nathaniel Bliss,
was similarly tied to the lunar idea. This was one
of those weird things where the fact that they both
had formal educations made people believe them more than they

(20:13):
believed someone who was self taught. But then also a
lot of people seem to have this really weird idea
that the harder method would be better somehow than one
that was easy. Uh, sometimes I do that in life,
so I can't judge them too harshly. Yeah. So Neville
Maskeline became Harrison's nemesis. He became the official observer for

(20:37):
Harrison's do over of his trial of the Age four,
even though Maskelin had a vested interest in his own
work winning the prize. In spite of Maskeline's involvement, the
H four did pass its second test again, once again
with flying colors, and after a long delay, the Board
of Longitude granted Harrison half the prize, promising the remainder

(20:59):
if he handed over all of his prior work and
built two more models of the H four. But as
time passed, George the Third started adding more requirements to
the Longitude Act, which at this point was more than
fifty years old, and some of these requirements specifically referred
to Harrison and his work. Harrison's relationship with the Board

(21:20):
became progressively more and more adversarial. The Board kept demanding
that he dismantled and reassemble the H four and the
presence of observers, which had never been part of the
requirements and which you know, Harrison was logically afraid that
someone was going to steal his idea. Mascalin, who was
still acting as Harrison's taskmaster, also at the same time

(21:42):
started publishing his own astronomical charts for people to use
instead of this clock idea. All of this craziness dragged
on and on, and even though the H four had
been proven to work as it was supposed to, Masculine
collected it along with all of Harrison's other time pieces
to subject it to ten months more of tests, and

(22:04):
which he insisted on conducting himself. And these tests went
on from May of seventeen sixty six to March of
seventeen sixty seven. And not only did the H four fail,
but it also never worked properly after this. Yes, possible
masculine had something to do with that fact. Yeah, he
also short walk to get there. Yeah. He also handled

(22:26):
all the other clocks really roughly in transporting them, Like
one of them was dropped while loading it onto the
cart that was going to take them to London, and
the cart that took them to London was just inordinately
bad and very rattily and shaky. He just did not
take care with the whole thing. So, finally, after a

(22:46):
great deal of angry back and forth, Harrison did actually
make two more H four's watchmaker Larkham Kendall made a
reproduction as well, which he called K one, which took
him more than two years to complete. K one on
Captain James Cook's second voyage. He had previously spoken very
highly of the lunar method. Meanwhile, Harris had moved on

(23:07):
to making yet another watch, which was the H five.
As this was happening, his son William wrote to King
George the Third, this letter detailing all of his father's
work and how difficult things had been with the Longitude Board.
Um as later reported by William Harrison's son John so
the John Harrison clockmaker's grandson, King George said, these people

(23:32):
have been cruelly treated by God. Harrison, I will see
you righted. King George went to the Prime Minister at
this point, and the Prime Minister then went to the Board,
and finally, in April of seventeen seventy three, Harrison was
granted eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds, which was
most of the difference between the ten thousand he had

(23:53):
been given earlier and the twenty thousand that he had
earned by completing this task. But it's specific quickly was
not the grand prize. Although the Board of Longitude was
in existence for a hundred and fourteen years and it
ultimately spent a hundred and one thousand pounds and an
attempts to crack the longitude problem, it never awarded the

(24:13):
twenty thousand pound prize to anyone. One of the arguments
that was made against Harrison getting it was that the
H four was too expensive and time consuming to mass produce.
I mean it had taken this other watchmaker, Larkham Kendall
two years to make up one reproduction of it. Um.
None of this had been part of the original stipulations though. Yeah,

(24:36):
it does seem a little harassing at that point. Yeah,
it really starts to feel like the board was just like,
we don't want to part with that money. Yeah. However,
Captain Cook was absolutely glowing about the K one when
he returned from his journey. He said that it quote
exceeded the expectations of its most zealous advocate and called

(24:57):
it our faithful guide through all vicissitude and climates. Yeah,
he pretty much would converted from his previous uh feeling,
which was that the astronomical charts that had been provided
to him on his first voyage had worked perfectly well uh.
At the end of this whole saga, John Harrison died
on March seventeen seventy six, only a couple of years

(25:22):
after being awarded this additional eight thousand, seven fifty pounds Larkham.
Kendall's attempts to mass produce Harrison's designs were really not
at the quality that Harrison had managed. They were inferior,
But one of them, known as the K two, was
stolen from Captain Bly during the mutiny on the Bounty,

(25:42):
other watchmakers kept trying to figure out how to mass
produce and build on this original idea, and finally, watchmakers
John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw each managed to figure out
ways to mass produce them, although the quality of what
was put out really varied a whole lot. By the
seven teen eighties, though using a chronometer to take a

(26:02):
longitude reading became a common part of ship's logs, many
ships had more than one for the sake of both
redundancy and accuracy. They would take the same reading with
lots of different blocks to try to make sure that
they had the most accurate one. The h M. S.
Beagle reportedly had twenty two of them when Charles Darwin
began his voyages, and most of Harrison's clocks are now

(26:26):
in London's National Maritime Museum, as well as other museums
throughout the world. It's kind of a side note. There
was a lot of talk as all of this was
going on about, uh, what a great loss of life
would be prevented if the longitude problem were solved. I
read a really interested interesting paper while doing the research
for this about how scurvy was actually killing way more

(26:50):
sailors than shipwrecks did, and scurvy was killing more sailors
even than combat was, and the authors were like, if
they actually we really cared about the loss of life,
there would have been a scurvy board to take care
of that problem, which Captain Cook wound up doing by
his own efforts for his own crew without someone forcing

(27:12):
him to do it. So I found that to be
kind of an interesting aside. So now do you have
some listener mail for us to enjoy? Yes, I do.
This is from Kess, who writes about our episode on
the Battle of Blair Mountain. Kess says, in the episode,
you mentioned my hometown of Fort Thomas, Kentucky, where my
family has lived for four generations. Although my family loves history,

(27:34):
I somehow missed that the soldiers from the fort once
participated in the national conflict. I've been to the fort
many times because, in addition to still serving as an
army reserve, basis also a local park. As kids, my
brother and I spent many hours at the fort, exploring
the woods, playing tennis, and climbing the jungle gyms. We
used to mountain bike on the same roads that the
Army jeeps used for training exercises. My grandmother, who married

(27:58):
into the Fort Thomas side of our family, was the
daughter of a coal miner. Grandma Eleanor never let us
forget our roots in the coal industry and made sure
that my brother and I grew up knowing the differences
between bituminous and anthracite coal. Most coal in the United States,
such as the coal mined at Blair Mountain, as a
bituminous coal, which has a lower carbon content than the
anthracite coal and burns less efficiently. Grandma l grew up

(28:22):
in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, where her father was
a member of the United Mine Workers Union. My great
grandpa was called Snowball, and he was a child of
Russian and Polish immigrants who came through Ellis Island. Snowball
started working at the mines when he was thirteen, having
just finished third grade. When he was fifteen, Snowball was
promoted to shovel operator, and during his nearly five decades

(28:42):
in the coal industry, Snowball learned to operate the steam,
diesel and electrical shovels. Shovel operation was considered a pretty
good job at the time, became because it came with
less health risks than most mining careers. Snowballs worked with
the shovels took place on the surface of the mine,
so he did not have to regularly enter shafts and
was not exposed to the same amounts of carbon dust
as other miners. Snowball outlived many of his mining colleagues,

(29:05):
but was able to meet some of his great grandchildren,
including me, before he passed away at the age of
ninety three. Recently, my dad took me on a pilgrimage
to the coal region to see family and friends. We
visited several mining towns, including Centralia, where a coal fire
has been burning underground since nineteen sixty two, Shndo, where
the Great Anthracite Coal Stride took place in nineteen o two,

(29:28):
and William Penn, a former company town where my great
grandfather served as chief of the volunteer fire department. A
picture of my great grandfather still hangs on the wall
at the firehouse. I will never forget my expedition to
the coal region, because while I always knew that coal
was important to my family, I never really appreciated how
extensively cold contributed to the formation of the modern United States.

(29:51):
My grandfather from Fort Thomas and my grandmother from the
coal region met in Washington, d C. When they both
joined the Navy to improve their prospects. I wonder if
they ever spoke about the connection between the Fort Thomas
and the coal industry, or if they ever realized how
the Battle of Blair Mountain mutually affected their lives. While
my grandmother is no longer with us, Grandpa is still
active in Love's history. I will definitely play your podcast

(30:12):
for him the next time I'm home. Thanks for helping
us make a new memory and for the great work
that you do. Kiss. I wanted to read this for
a couple of reasons. Uh. One is that I love
when we have family stories that are tied to the podcast.
The other is that Kess included how to pronounce the
town of Shendo, which is specifically spelled like Shenandoah, which

(30:34):
is pronounced Shenandoah when used for other parts of the
world in other places, and pretty much any example of
when something has a pronunciation that's pretty established as being
different from how local people say it is the time
that I need someone to spell that out for me
because I would have said it wrong. Yeah, I totally

(30:54):
would have gone with Shenandoah, yeah, because there is there
are definitely other places pronounced that way. So thank you
yes for writing and for telling me how to say
shando uh. If you would like to write to us,
you can. We're at history Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com

(31:14):
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history.
Are tumbler is miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're on Pinterest at pentterest dot com slash miss
in history. If you would like to learn more about
what we have talked about today, you can come to
our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot
com and put the word longitude into the search bar.

(31:35):
You will find an article called how to use the
Stars to find your way. If you would like to
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
you'll find our show notes, you'll find all of the episodes,
and we will be putting in some links that tell
you in more detail how to figure out where you
are using things like clocks and stars and moons and
sons and things, because that would have been very convoluted

(31:56):
to explain in the episode. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how suff works dot
com or ms in history dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com. Mmm m