For seafarers, precise navigation ensures safety, increases speed and efficiency, and allows for a successful voyage. The Quest for Longitude reveals how the determination of longitude at sea became feasible, and of how global positions could be agreed and the world known with greater clarity. Written in a riveting and accessible manner, The Quest for Longitude features more than 150 photographs specially commissioned from Britain's National Maritime Museum. The publication of the book will accompany an exhibition that will open at the museum in June 2014 (to coincide with the tercentenary of the first Longitude Act) and which will tour overseas in 2015-16. Contents in The Quest for Longitude include: Introduction: The Longitude Problem -- What longitude is and why it mattered to seafaring nations 1714 in Context -- The historical background to the 1714 Longitude Act The Public Spectacle of Longitude - How the public perceived the longitude problem in the mid eighteenth century -- Sea trials of the ideas of Harrison, Mayer, and Irwin Inside Harrison's Timekeepers -- A closer look at Harrison's technology Making Longitude Work -- The dispute between the Harrisons and the Board of Longitude in the wake of the sea trials and 1765 Longitude Act -- The voyages of Captain Cook and their role in proving the new navigational methods Enterprise and Eccentricity -- The rise of technological entrepreneurs -- Controversies, accusations, and recriminations, including the Arnold-Earnshaw battles around the development and commercial exploitation of the chronometer -- The transformation of the Board of Longitude into an advisory body and financial backer An Empire of the Seas -- British and European imperial and commercial aspirations and the economic exploitation of overseas territories and their products -- Major British projects including the foundation and maintenance of a new colony in Australia, the Bounty voyages to transport breadfruit between different parts of Britain's expanding empire and the expeditions of Matthew Flinders and George Vancouver The World Defined -- The role of new navigational techniques as foundations of an era of global surveying and mapping, with the Beagle expeditions as a telling example -- The establishment of the Greenwich meridian as the world's prime meridian -- The ongoing search for improved methods of navigation.