NavList:

Many of you probably saw that actor Michael Gambon died a few days ago. Of course he had a long career with many roles. Quite a few news headlines noted that he played Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts school for wizard kids in the Harry Potter series of films (after Richard Harris, who had the role first, himself passed away). It's been in my head since I saw that he had died that there was a navigation connection. Hmm... What was it??

It finally dawned on me this morning...

Michael Gambon played John Harrison, chronometer-maker, in the film series "Longitude" that was produced back in 1999-2000. The film flipped back and forth between two stories showing us Jeremy Irons as Rupert Gould, the restorer of the Harrison watches and clocks in the early twentieth century, and also telling the tale (unfortunately with the legendary elements amplified far more than in Dava Sobel's book) of John Harrison's creation of the first successful prototype or "demo" of a marine chronometer in the mid-eighteenth century. 

In the image from "Longitude" below, we're seeing a fictionalized conversation between John Harrison (Gambon) and Edmond Halley (John Wood, probably most famous for the role of "Professor Falken" in WarGames) discussing possible solutions to the problem of longitude, and Halley has just announced that "we know the answer to the longitude problem -- the stars!" by which they mean "lunars", of course. This is a scene set a few moments after they have bumped into two men carrying a pair of poor dogs used to illustrate the story of the "powder of sympathy". That didn't happen! As I say, the film exaggerates the amusing legendary portions from Sobel's book out of all proportion, but it's done for entertainment, and on that score it works.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

File: