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It`s Okay To Be Smart, How We Solved the Greatest Riddle In Navigation (1)

How We Solved the Greatest Riddle In Navigation (1)

Ever since we figured out

that we live on a world bigger than what we could see,

our species has been exploring.

But the moment you leave home,

there's this one really crucial thing

you have to figure out: Where am I now?

To modern eyes, it's a simple question because, you know.

But figuring out how to figure that out

has been one of the ultimate quests of human knowledge,

like ever.

In the end, it took more than 400 years of experimenting

and even inventing whole new branches of science

in order to answer that question accurately.

And the most surprising connection

to come out of this epic scientific quest,

a discovery that all of us still rely on today

is that knowing where you are depends on knowing

when you are.

(gentle music)

Hey, smart people, Joe here.

So back in like fourth grade geography,

you probably learned about these lines

that crisscrossed the globe, right?

Hold on.

This whole time, this globe hasn't had latitude

and longitude on it.

No.

(gentle music)

I always keep a backup globe around.

Okay, the horizontal ones are latitude,

they tell you how far north or south you are

from the equator, which happens to be zero degrees latitude.

These vertical ones are longitude

which tell you how far east or west you are

from this line at zero degrees longitude,

which slices right through a little burrow of London

called Greenwich.

There's a reason why that is zero

over all of these other lines,

because of a very particular scientific revolution

that took place right there.

(globe crushing)

This is a story that connects clock makers,

astronomers, sailors, mathematicians, kings and queens,

space satellites, and even smart bombs.

The discovery at the center of all of this

enabled the creation of the colonial empires

that shaped our modern world

by giving ships a more precise and reliable way

to navigate the open seas.

Speaking of navigation, how did people used to do that?

Latitude is actually pretty easy to find

'cause you can do it using the sun or other stars,

which humans have been doing for thousands of years.

Here's just one way to do that

so you can see how simple it is.

The north star is basically at a fixed point in the sky

over the North Pole.

You can figure your latitude

by measuring how high it is in the sky.

At the equator, zero degrees,

it's basically at the horizon in France,

it's at about 45 degrees.

And at the North Pole, it's 90 degrees up above your head.

Congratulations, you can latitude.

People from the Phoenicians to the Polynesians

to early Hindu astronomers

developed their own tools to interpret the position

and movement of stars and figure out

how far north or south they were.

That may even be how ancient aliens

Egyptians align the pyramids.

Who put that in the prompter?

That did not happen.

It wasn't aliens.

But figuring out longitude is much more difficult

for a really obvious but kind of weird reason

because all of those reference points in the sky

that you want to use for measuring,

they're moving to as the earth rotates.

The earth is spinning, which means the sun and the stars

move across the sky every day,

so you can't just use their position to find

how far you've moved in the same direction.

But going back to ancient Greeks, like Ptolemy,

people figured out this pretty neat connection:

To find out how much you've moved east or west,

you just have to know how far in time you've moved.

Let me explain.

Our planet takes 24 hours to complete

one full 360 degree revolution,

which means each hour or 1/24th of a spin

represents 15 degrees of longitude.

If it's 3:00 AM in London, and where I am

the clock says it's only midnight,

I know that I'm three earth rotation hours away from London

and that means 45 degrees of longitude.

And since I'm earlier, that means I'm west.

That's it.

If you know the time in two places,

you can figure out longitude.

It sounds simple because today

knowing exactly what time it is in two places at once

is simple.

But getting accurate time 400 years ago

was anything but simple.

And trying to figure out a way that you could do that

on a moving ship in the middle of the ocean

stumped the brightest minds in the world for centuries.

The search for longitude was like

searching for the fountain of youth

or a way to turn lead to gold,

It was this almost mythical quest.

And then in the 1700's, it got real.

So it's 1707, and this British admiral

named Sir Cloudesley Shovell

is leading his fleet home

after a little skirmish with the French.

Wait, is that his real name?

That sounds like the name you'd make up

to make fun of a pompous British admiral guy.

Okay, it's real?

Okay, Sir Cloudesley Shovell,

he'd won the fight and were on their way home to celebrate

when it got really foggy.

And since back then to navigate out of sight of shore,

you needed to be able to see the sky,

this basically meant they had no idea where they were.

After 12 days in bad weather,

Shovell's best navigators put their heads together

to try and figure out the fleet's position.

Really the only option they had

was to rely on something called dead reckoning,

basically figuring out where you are

by estimating your speed and compass heading

to plot your journey.

But winds and currents, they make this pretty imprecise,

and they got it wrong.

One by one, four very expensive warships

crashed on the rocky coast of the Scilly Isles.

Wait, that's their real name?

That sounds like islands you'd make up

to make fun of British islands.

So on the rocks of the Scilly Islands,

like 2,000 sailors died, making Shovell's error

one of the biggest screw ups

in the history of ocean navigation.

For early sailors,

mistakes like this could be deadly in more ways than one,

even if you didn't crash unnecessarily long journeys

meant your crew might starve or get scurvy,

and nobody likes scurvy.

Plus because ships had to follow established routes,

that increased your chances

of running into pirates or your enemies.

So in 1714, these misadventures

had proven just too much for the monarchy

and the British government set up a prize,

20,000 pounds to anyone who figured out

how to accurately find longitude at sea.

And you're like, "Ooh, big deal, 20,000 pounds?"

Well, factoring in inflation,

the Longitude prize would be worth around 6 million today,

that's like six times what you'd get for a Nobel Prize.

Figuring this out would save lives and money

but these Imperial Navys definitely also realized that

whoever was first to figure this out

would open up the world.

Now remember, people had been trying to solve this riddle

for a long time.

The biggest science brains of history had tried and failed

because no one could figure out

how you could accurately know what time it is

in some far off place.

Everyone trying to win the prize

basically settled on one of two strategies:

The first one, let's call them Team Almanac,

realized if you and someone else

could both observe some astronomical event

at the same moment,

and you knew exactly when that event should happen,

you could figure out the time difference

between the two locations.

Let's just say hypothetically

every day at a specific moment, this one star turns purple

for exactly one second.

In London, we know that happens at 3:00 AM,

this is fake and doesn't happen,

but it gets the idea across.

I'm sailing on a ship and wherever I am,

I look up and I see that star blink purple,

I check my local clock and it's only 12 midnight.

Now I know that I'm three hours

of earth rotation from London, and like I said before,

that means I'm 45 degrees west of London.

So that is a completely made up example,

but thanks to astronomers watching the sky

and writing stuff down,

and thanks to all that math

that people like Newton invented,

people had gotten pretty good at predicting the movements

of stars and stuff on future dates.

There were literal books

full of where different sky objects would be

at different times and dates.

But this was not easy.

Assembling all of that astronomical information

took literal decades of observations

and very complex calculations by hand

and your location was only as good

as the information in your little almanac.

All this precision astronomy was really new back then.

So if your little book was wrong,

your longitude calculation would be off too.

So the second team, let's call them Team Clock,

said, "What if we could just make this easier,

cut out all that astronomical math stuff

and just carry an accurate clock

that always tells us what time it is

back at zero degrees longitude?

Then just compare that with your local time

and bam, you know your longitude."

The thing is, keeping time on a ship wasn't easy either.

You could figure out local time, wherever you were

by marking noon each day

by waiting for the sun to reach its highest point,

but knowing what time it was back in Greenwich, no way,

because clocks that kind of stunk.

Pendulum clocks, they don't keep very good time at sea

because motion on the ocean messed with their swings

and their metal parts

were sensitive to changes in temperature and pressure.

They'd slow down, speed up,

or sometimes just stop running entirely.

Mechanical clocks, the ones with springs and stuff

weren't much better at the time,

a few weeks at sea with a bad mechanical watch

and your Greenwich time is wrong.

What they needed was to build a better clock

than anyone had ever built.

And the person who finally did that was a carpenter

from Nowheresville, England.

John "Longitude" Harrison.

I have no idea if they actually called him that,

but they probably should have,

he really has a nice ring to it.

No one really knows how John Harrison

got so good at making clocks,

but he was a self-taught timekeeping genius.

You could say he was the first big TikTok-er.

(crickets chirping)

After like 40 years of tinkering and prototyping,

Harrison built a clock based around a spring

made from this new kind of steel

and these low friction bearings

made from literal jewels and gems.

When it was tested at sea,

it didn't lose more than a second over a whole month.

Even the most expensive Swiss watches today

can drift by seconds every 24 hours.

So Harrison's marine chronometers

were some of the most precise machines ever built.

And ultimately he ended up winning the Longitude Prize.

Their new longitudinal prowess gave British sailors

an advantage when it came to navigation

and was not a small reason

their flag came to dominate the globe.

And meanwhile, all the cutting edge astronomical work

happening at the Royal Observatory

and the fact that they were in charge of the Longitude Prize

put Greenwich on the map for all of history

when that meridian was officially named

Zero Degrees Longitude.

I mean, think about it,

unlike the equator for latitude,

zero degrees longitude could technically be anywhere, right?

But because of all of this history,

this line is where longitude is measured from today.

Most people don't think about longitude much today

but it unlocked this really strange idea

that had been floating around since the ancient Greeks.

Knowing when you are can tell you where you are.

And this same idea is why every time you open your phone up

and look at a map, you know precisely where you are.

The GPS satellites orbiting our planet

send out time coded messages.

When one reaches a GPS receiver, it compares its local time

How We Solved the Greatest Riddle In Navigation (1) |||||загадка|| Cómo resolvimos el mayor enigma de la navegación (1) Hoe we het grootste raadsel in de navigatie oplosten (1)

Ever since we figured out Відтоді як||||

that we live on a world bigger than what we could see, що|||||||ніж||||

our species has been exploring. ||||досліджуючи

But the moment you leave home, |||||додому

there's this one really crucial thing |||||річ

you have to figure out: Where am I now? |||||де|||

To modern eyes, it's a simple question because, you know. ||сучасні очі|||||||знати

But figuring out how to figure that out Але|||||||

has been one of the ultimate quests of human knowledge, має||||||квестів|||

like ever. |коли-небудь

In the end, it took more than 400 years of experimenting ||врешті-решт|це||||||експериментування

and even inventing whole new branches of science |||||||науки

in order to answer that question accurately. ||||||точно

And the most surprising connection ||||зв'язок

to come out of this epic scientific quest, |||||||дослідження

a discovery that all of us still rely on today |||||||||сьогодні

is that knowing where you are depends on knowing

when you are.

(gentle music)

Hey, smart people, Joe here.

So back in like fourth grade geography, ||||||географія

you probably learned about these lines

that crisscrossed the globe, right? |перехрещувався|||

Hold on.

This whole time, this globe hasn't had latitude

and longitude on it.

No.

(gentle music)

I always keep a backup globe around.

Okay, the horizontal ones are latitude,

they tell you how far north or south you are

from the equator, which happens to be zero degrees latitude.

These vertical ones are longitude

which tell you how far east or west you are

from this line at zero degrees longitude,

which slices right through a little burrow of London

called Greenwich.

There's a reason why that is zero

over all of these other lines,

because of a very particular scientific revolution

that took place right there.

(globe crushing)

This is a story that connects clock makers,

astronomers, sailors, mathematicians, kings and queens, астрономи|моряки||королі||королеви

space satellites, and even smart bombs.

The discovery at the center of all of this

enabled the creation of the colonial empires ||||||колоніальні імперії

that shaped our modern world

by giving ships a more precise and reliable way

to navigate the open seas.

Speaking of navigation, how did people used to do that?

Latitude is actually pretty easy to find

'cause you can do it using the sun or other stars,

which humans have been doing for thousands of years.

Here's just one way to do that

so you can see how simple it is.

The north star is basically at a fixed point in the sky

over the North Pole.

You can figure your latitude

by measuring how high it is in the sky.

At the equator, zero degrees,

it's basically at the horizon in France, ||||||Франція

it's at about 45 degrees. |||градусів

And at the North Pole, it's 90 degrees up above your head.

Congratulations, you can latitude.

People from the Phoenicians to the Polynesians |||фінікійці|||Полінезійці

to early Hindu astronomers ||індійський|

developed their own tools to interpret the position

and movement of stars and figure out

how far north or south they were.

That may even be how ancient aliens ||||||інопланетяни

Egyptians align the pyramids.

Who put that in the prompter? |||||телесуфлер

That did not happen.

It wasn't aliens.

But figuring out longitude is much more difficult

for a really obvious but kind of weird reason

because all of those reference points in the sky

that you want to use for measuring,

they're moving to as the earth rotates.

The earth is spinning, which means the sun and the stars

move across the sky every day,

so you can't just use their position to find

how far you've moved in the same direction.

But going back to ancient Greeks, like Ptolemy, |||||||Птолемей

people figured out this pretty neat connection:

To find out how much you've moved east or west,

you just have to know how far in time you've moved.

Let me explain.

Our planet takes 24 hours to complete

one full 360 degree revolution,

which means each hour or 1/24th of a spin

represents 15 degrees of longitude.

If it's 3:00 AM in London, and where I am

the clock says it's only midnight, |||||опівночі

I know that I'm three earth rotation hours away from London

and that means 45 degrees of longitude.

And since I'm earlier, that means I'm west.

That's it.

If you know the time in two places,

you can figure out longitude.

It sounds simple because today

knowing exactly what time it is in two places at once

is simple.

But getting accurate time 400 years ago

was anything but simple.

And trying to figure out a way that you could do that

on a moving ship in the middle of the ocean

stumped the brightest minds in the world for centuries.

The search for longitude was like

searching for the fountain of youth |||фонтан||

or a way to turn lead to gold,

It was this almost mythical quest.

And then in the 1700's, it got real.

So it's 1707, and this British admiral

named Sir Cloudesley Shovell ||Клаудеслі|Шовел

is leading his fleet home |||флот|

after a little skirmish with the French. |||сутичка|||

Wait, is that his real name?

That sounds like the name you'd make up

to make fun of a pompous British admiral guy. |||||помпезний|||

Okay, it's real?

Okay, Sir Cloudesley Shovell,

he'd won the fight and were on their way home to celebrate

when it got really foggy. ||||туманно

And since back then to navigate out of sight of shore,

you needed to be able to see the sky,

this basically meant they had no idea where they were.

After 12 days in bad weather,

Shovell's best navigators put their heads together Шовелла||||||

to try and figure out the fleet's position. ||||||флоту|

Really the only option they had

was to rely on something called dead reckoning, |||||||мережа мертвих розрахунків

basically figuring out where you are

by estimating your speed and compass heading |оцінюючи|||||

to plot your journey.

But winds and currents, they make this pretty imprecise, ||||||||непевно

and they got it wrong.

One by one, four very expensive warships ||||||військові кораблі

crashed on the rocky coast of the Scilly Isles.

Wait, that's their real name?

That sounds like islands you'd make up

to make fun of British islands.

So on the rocks of the Scilly Islands, ||||||Сіллі|

like 2,000 sailors died, making Shovell's error

one of the biggest screw ups ||||помилка|

in the history of ocean navigation.

For early sailors,

mistakes like this could be deadly in more ways than one,

even if you didn't crash unnecessarily long journeys |||||непотрібно||подорожі

meant your crew might starve or get scurvy,

and nobody likes scurvy.

Plus because ships had to follow established routes,

that increased your chances

of running into pirates or your enemies.

So in 1714, these misadventures |||нещасні випадки

had proven just too much for the monarchy |||||||монархія

and the British government set up a prize,

20,000 pounds to anyone who figured out

how to accurately find longitude at sea.

And you're like, "Ooh, big deal, 20,000 pounds?"

Well, factoring in inflation, |||інфляція

the Longitude prize would be worth around 6 million today,

that's like six times what you'd get for a Nobel Prize.

Figuring this out would save lives and money

but these Imperial Navys definitely also realized that ||імперські|ВМС||||

whoever was first to figure this out

would open up the world.

Now remember, people had been trying to solve this riddle

for a long time.

The biggest science brains of history had tried and failed

because no one could figure out

how you could accurately know what time it is

in some far off place.

Everyone trying to win the prize

basically settled on one of two strategies:

The first one, let's call them Team Almanac, |||||||Альманах

realized if you and someone else

could both observe some astronomical event

at the same moment,

and you knew exactly when that event should happen,

you could figure out the time difference

between the two locations.

Let's just say hypothetically

every day at a specific moment, this one star turns purple

for exactly one second.

In London, we know that happens at 3:00 AM,

this is fake and doesn't happen,

but it gets the idea across.

I'm sailing on a ship and wherever I am,

I look up and I see that star blink purple,

I check my local clock and it's only 12 midnight.

Now I know that I'm three hours

of earth rotation from London, and like I said before,

that means I'm 45 degrees west of London.

So that is a completely made up example,

but thanks to astronomers watching the sky

and writing stuff down,

and thanks to all that math

that people like Newton invented,

people had gotten pretty good at predicting the movements

of stars and stuff on future dates.

There were literal books

full of where different sky objects would be

at different times and dates.

But this was not easy.

Assembling all of that astronomical information Збирання|||||

took literal decades of observations

and very complex calculations by hand

and your location was only as good

as the information in your little almanac.

All this precision astronomy was really new back then.

So if your little book was wrong,

your longitude calculation would be off too.

So the second team, let's call them Team Clock,

said, "What if we could just make this easier,

cut out all that astronomical math stuff

and just carry an accurate clock

that always tells us what time it is

back at zero degrees longitude?

Then just compare that with your local time

and bam, you know your longitude."

The thing is, keeping time on a ship wasn't easy either.

You could figure out local time, wherever you were

by marking noon each day

by waiting for the sun to reach its highest point,

but knowing what time it was back in Greenwich, no way,

because clocks that kind of stunk.

Pendulum clocks, they don't keep very good time at sea

because motion on the ocean messed with their swings

and their metal parts

were sensitive to changes in temperature and pressure.

They'd slow down, speed up,

or sometimes just stop running entirely.

Mechanical clocks, the ones with springs and stuff

weren't much better at the time,

a few weeks at sea with a bad mechanical watch

and your Greenwich time is wrong.

What they needed was to build a better clock

than anyone had ever built.

And the person who finally did that was a carpenter |||||||||тесля

from Nowheresville, England. |незначне місце|

John "Longitude" Harrison.

I have no idea if they actually called him that,

but they probably should have,

he really has a nice ring to it.

No one really knows how John Harrison

got so good at making clocks,

but he was a self-taught timekeeping genius.

You could say he was the first big TikTok-er.

(crickets chirping)

After like 40 years of tinkering and prototyping, ||||експериментування||

Harrison built a clock based around a spring

made from this new kind of steel

and these low friction bearings ||||підшипники

made from literal jewels and gems. |||драгоцінності||коштовності

When it was tested at sea,

it didn't lose more than a second over a whole month.

Even the most expensive Swiss watches today

can drift by seconds every 24 hours.

So Harrison's marine chronometers |||морські хронометри

were some of the most precise machines ever built.

And ultimately he ended up winning the Longitude Prize.

Their new longitudinal prowess gave British sailors |||майстерність|||

an advantage when it came to navigation

and was not a small reason

their flag came to dominate the globe.

And meanwhile, all the cutting edge astronomical work

happening at the Royal Observatory |||Королівський|

and the fact that they were in charge of the Longitude Prize

put Greenwich on the map for all of history

when that meridian was officially named

Zero Degrees Longitude.

I mean, think about it,

unlike the equator for latitude,

zero degrees longitude could technically be anywhere, right?

But because of all of this history,

this line is where longitude is measured from today.

Most people don't think about longitude much today

but it unlocked this really strange idea ||відкрила||||

that had been floating around since the ancient Greeks.

Knowing when you are can tell you where you are.

And this same idea is why every time you open your phone up

and look at a map, you know precisely where you are.

The GPS satellites orbiting our planet

send out time coded messages. |||codificados|

When one reaches a GPS receiver, it compares its local time |||||receptor GPS|||||