Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2000 (Vol. 68, No. 20))
John Harrison, an obscure 18th-century carpenter and clockmaker from Yorkshire, solved a problem that had plagued sailors for centuries: how to tell East-West location at sea, thereby avoiding shipwrecks and other costly disasters. To aid sailors, the British government offered the Longitude Prize, an enormous sum of D20,000 (an amount equal to $12 million today), to the inventor of a device that would determine longitude "that shall have been Tried and found Practicable and useful at Sea." Harrison met the challenge with his Harrison's Number One-H-1, the first accurate portable clock. Dash ("We Shall Not Be Moved", 1996, etc.) brings the inventor to life with excerpts from his diaries and letters, as she reports on his painstaking experiments, refinements, and extensive sea tests of his 75-pound portable clock. B&w illustraions add a whimsical touch to the telling. For the gruff and meticulous clock-builder, perfecting the clock proved less difficult than claiming the prize offered. Politics and class distinctions in 18th-century England made it extremely difficult for someone not university-educated to get a fair hearing. It took the intervention of His Majesty George III and nearly 50 years of effort before Harrison saw even a portion of his prize money. Dash documents the development of Harrison's inventions and provides an overview of the politics and science of the period, introducing luminaries such as Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. Harrison emerges as a stubborn perfectionist who succeeded at long last through great effort. For a less-detailed but perhaps sufficient take on the subject, Trent Duffy's less-detailed "The Clock "(p. 630) provides a chapter on Harrison and his chronometric clock. Dash's title provides an in-depth look at a little known inventor and his life and times and makes good use of primary sources seldom available to students.

Elizabeth Bush (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, October 2000 (Vol. 54, No. 2))
As the prestige of the eighteenth-century British merchant and naval fleets was threatened by an unfortunate propensity to run aground for lack of accurate charts and position reckoning, a Board of Longitude was established which authorized a D20,000 reward for the inventor of a system or device that could calculate longitude with precision. Rural English clockmaker John Harrison produced and refined just such a device, a seaworthy clock that could help calculate distance from a point of known longitude on land, and his decades-long battle to prove its effectiveness to a Board that openly favored a lunar calculation system is the subject of Dash’s work. She navigates readers through the complexities of the rival systems with reasonable ease and does a good job of conveying the years of frustration and tedium that marked Harrison’s dealings with the Board--too good a job, perhaps, since some of that tedium occasionally (unavoidably?) spills into her narration, and not all readers will share the redoubtable Harrison’s determination to see this pursuit through. Petricic’s black-and-white illustrations, particularly the inventive initial vignettes that open each chapter, puff some wind into the sails when the momentum slows, though, and a glossary, timeline, and index assist researchers pursuing this bittersweet tale of justice denied. (Reviewed from galleys) Review Code: R -- Recommended. (c) Copyright 2000, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2000, Foster/Farrar, 208p, $16.00. Grades 5-9.