300 Years of the Royal Greenwich Observatory
The captain of the QE2 pressing a button to have his position anywhere typed out instantly with a margin of error one-third the length of his ship ... orbiting space-ships keeping a plotted rendezvous out in space ... time split into the unimaginable fragments of two-millionfhs of a second. These achievements of modern science and technology depend ultimately on the age-long work of astronomers; and notably the patient pioneering work of the astronomers of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, 300 years old this year.
Fyfe Robertson tells the story of the unlikely combination of a king's mistress and an earnest young parson in love with the stars who created the Royal Greenwich Observatory and was charged with a specific task (and for the whole sea-going world a life-or-death task) - accurate navigation. The Astronomers Royal at Greenwich, in solving a problem that had baffled the centuries, made their workshop, in a royal park beside the Thames, the most significant place in the world for the grateful mariners of every sea-going nation; the essential reference point on the pole-to-pole meridian that divides the world in two at longitude zero.
Producer TOM SAVAGE