In the striking work Clock at Sea, American Dava Sobel tells how a passionate craftsman named John Harrison, after half a century of research, created a mechanism that accurately measured the passage of time at sea, even before it reached land.

What was ignored in the 18th century, when Great Britain was emerging as the great maritime power of the world, was longitude. “The impossibility of measuring it over the centuries has cost thousands of human lives lost at sea, while at the same time creating serious obstacles to the commercial expansion and defensive armor of the island country.”

Sobel’s poem was published in Greek in 1997 by Livani under the title “Sign of the Seas” (it was first published in America in 1995 under the title “Longitude” and received a number of important awards), but now it is published in a new translation ( trans.: Panagiotis Drepaniotis, ed.: Vassilis Charmandaris) of the University Press of Crete, with a foreword written in a later English edition in 2005 by the best astronaut: Neil Armstrong.

He extracted from the stars the secrets of the arrangement of the world and locked the secret in his pocket watch.

“The moving moon,” writes Sobel, “full, crescent or meniscus, was for eighteenth-century navigators something like a luminous hand on a celestial clock. The boundless sky was the dial of this celestial clock, and the Sun, planets and stars drew numbers on their dial.

But was it enough? “The old captains understood the concept of latitude and could calculate it from the height of the North Star above the horizon,” Armstrong writes in the preface. “However, no one has been able to understand the concept of longitude,” adds the first man to walk on the moon, who speaks with boundless admiration of “the inventiveness and skill of John Harrison.” With equal humility, Armstrong notes that “because my profession required me to specialize in air and space navigation, it was inevitable that I would also be obsessed with maritime navigation.”

According to Mr. Gray, here we find another magical place: the place where the sky meets the sea. “With his marine clock,” comments Sobel, “John Harrison explored the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth dimension, time, to connect dots on a three-dimensional globe. He extracted from the stars the secrets of the arrangement of the world and locked the secret in his pocket watch.