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When Clocks Learned to Kill: The Untold True Stories of How Navigation, Timekeeping, and the Search for Position Became the Technologies of Remote War
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 11 2026
Pages: 274
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A Phoenician sailor reads the stars over an empty sea. A medieval astronomer in Baghdad engraves the sky onto brass. A Yorkshire clockmaker spends forty years solving the longitude problem. Two physicists listen to a beeping Soviet satellite in 1957 and ask the question whose answer becomes GPS.
From these beginnings - and a hundred others like them - When Clocks Learned to Kill traces the unbroken five-thousand-year line between ancient celestial navigation and the coordinates that guide precision weapons in modern warfare.
This is the untold history of how humanity learned to answer the oldest question: Where am I? - and how that answer, again and again, became a weapon.
- The Phoenicians who used the stars to build the ancient world's first trade empire
- The Islamic astronomers who saved Greek mathematics and invented the astrolabe
- John Harrison, the carpenter's son who solved the longitude problem that killed 2,000 sailors in a single night
- The Polish mathematicians who cracked Enigma before Bletchley Park existed
- The six women who programmed ENIAC - and were erased from history for decades
- The physicists who listened to Sputnik's Doppler shift and invented satellite navigation by accident
- The drone operator in eastern Ukraine whose weapon traces back to a Phoenician night sky
For readers of Dava Sobel's Longitude, Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, and David Mindell's War, Technology and Experience.
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