Hacker Cinema
Longitude
2000 · Film · 198 min
Directed by Charles Sturridge
Parallel stories: 18th century Harrison builds the marine chronometer for safe navigation at sea; 20th century Gould is obsessed with restoring it.
3 positive1 mixedfrom 4 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
There is an excellent British TV movie version with Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon.
Longitude, 3h 20m, 2000.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/
There's an excellent British TV movie version of Longitude (200 minutes, 2000, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/
If the history of timekeeping for navigation sounds interesting, check out the book (and movie) “Longitude” by Dava Sobel. It’s an incredible and largely-forgotten story.
If you like nonfiction:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/
In fiction, the A&E series of Horatio Hornblower films starring Ioan Gruffud were excellent.
I only know what I saw on the film adaptation of Longitude, which was a one-note perseverance story that may not be the most objectively accurate: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/
Harrison apparently spent his whole life building these clocks and fighting to secure the prize given a hostile council of astronomers who had pre-decided that an astronomical method put forth by some learned man would win, not some pathetic carpenter. Every demonstration he made, they would decide they required some higher standard of proof, or some rule had changed which invalidated the demonstration. He became extremely bitter at the process. His son spent much of his life attempting to validate the timepieces in naval voyages. Harrison was only awarded part of the prize on his deathbed after intervention by a sympathetic sovereign and also the death of some of the strong personalities on the Board.