Welcome to sitesALIVE! I like to read biographies of accomplished people (for example, Abraham Lincoln), and also histories of certain events. I remember reading The Path Between the Seas, by David McCullough, about the building of the Panama Canal while we were transiting the Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific before our first big sitesALIVE program in 1993. A remarkable book that I always like to suggest is by one of our own Team of Experts, Dava Sobel, entitled Longitude. It’s about John Harrison, a watchmaker, who invented the first chronometer to allow mariners to know their longitude at sea. They could get their latitude, but not their longitude, so essentially, until Harrison’s chronometer, mariners were lost at sea. It’s an amazing story of perseverance, and is beautifully and compactly written. Thanks to Dava for that book!

Question from Yeon’s class, Seongnamsi, South Korea