The last museum

Yesterday we took the boat cruise up the Thames and ended up at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. This is a small gem. Atop a hill and in the midst of a beautiful park, the small observatory was founded in 1675 to solve the longitude problem. At that time, sailors could determine their north-south position by measuring the angle between certain stars or the sun and the horizon, but determining the east-west position, their longitude, was impossible. This led to many shipwrecks - bad for the sailors, good for the artists whose work line the galleries of the observatory.

One method to determine longitude is to have accurate star charts from a fixed location, like maybe an observatory in England. Then you take a reading of your location, like at sea, perform some lunar related calculations, and voila! Longitude! But that was an awful lot of work, and in 1714 Parliament offered 20K pounds to the first person who could develop an accurate timepiece that could be taken aboard a ship. With a timepiece you could figure out Noon local time, calculate how many hours it is from Noon Greenwich time, and figure out your longitude.

An amateur watchmaker named John Harrison took up the challenge, and his four entries serve as the centerpiece of the observatory. Before these timepieces, thousands of men were lost at sea because they had no idea where they were. After them, John Harrison was nearly 20K pounds richer (although it took nearly 60 years) and the British Navy had the science it needed to become the most powerful in the world. So you walk into this little building and soon are standing before what are quite possibly the four most important machines in the history of mankind. This is right up there with making fire, the combustion engine, and the cell phone.

To which my family basically said, "eh".

Today we returned to the British Museum, the 6th visit for Ava and the kids. Look, the Rosetta Stone! Yawn. Wow, that's the frieze from the Parthenon ... THE Parthenon, from about 400 BC. Nice, can we get some ice cream?


The Tower Bridge? So what!

We conclude that it is time. That's right, we are done with with museums. We have been good, faithfully seeing what needs to be seen, oooohing our ohs, aaaahing our ahs. Now we need to stop seeing and get back to doing. We went to Regents Park this afternoon and played a rousing game of basoc, which is baseball with a soccer ball and sticks, followed by hopscotch at the playground. It's a start!

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