Andrewes Serves as Consultant for Episode of PBS Show NOVA

NOVA, the award-winning PBS science series, launches its 25th-anniversary season on Channel 2 at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 6, with Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude, a one-hour presentation on one of the great feats of technological history: the development of an accurate and practical method for determining longitude on the high seas.

Narrated by actor Richard Dreyfuss, the show features dramatizations and interviews to chronicle how an obscure 18th-century clockmaker named John Harrison devoted his life to producing a device that the greatest minds of the day (including Sir Isaac Newton) had declared flatly impossible to perfect.

On board a sailing vessel to demonstrate the limitations of early navigational devices is William J.H. Andrewes, the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and a specialist in clocks and marine navigation. In 1993 (the 300th anniversary of Harrison's birth), Andrewes organized "The Longitude Symposium," which drew 500 experts from 17 nations to Harvard to examine the vast social, cultural, economic, and scientific consequences of Harrison's invention. Edited by Andrewes, the symposium proceedings appeared as The Quest for Longitude, which won the 1997 Media Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (New England Section).

A companion volume -- The Illustrated Longitude by Andrewes and Dava Sobel -- appears this fall from Walker and Company.