Another story from the book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling by Stephen Denning is the story about longitude. Anyone who has looked at a map knows what longitude and latitude are. How did longitude come about? It was one of the great scientific problems throughout the 18th century. After years of working with limited solutions a large prize was offered by the Board of Longitude to anyone who could come up with a solution.

A self-taught clock maker named John Harrison came up with a solution  – a clock on the ships would keep precise time. To find the longitude the angle of the sun at noon is measured against a known point (Greenwich), then longitude would be calculated.

The Board of Longitude did not like the solution, maybe did not like Mr. Harrison (he was not one of them), they tried all the tricks in the book to send Mr. Harrison away.  Mr. Harrison was proven accurate in 1762, but did not receive his prize till 1773.

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