[TO THE] LORDS COMMISSIONERS FOR THE LONGITUDE [caption title].
Purshull, Conyers:
[London? 1715]. Small folio broadside. Dbd. Closely cropped, with loss of first line of title and portion of printed signature. Early folds and early stab holes in left margin. Mild foxing. Overall very good. An extremely rare petitionary leaflet relating to the historic longitude prize, evidently printed during the first two years of the Board of Longitude. In 1714, responding to a problem that had continued to beleaguer sailors and cartographers well into the age of navigation, Parliament passed the Longitude Act, establishing awards from £10,000 to £20,000 for developing an accurate methods of determining longitude and a panel, the Board of Longitude, to judge submissions. The author of the present document, Conyers Purshull (for whom no biographical information has been discovered), had submitted a plan for finding longitude at sea by "measuring the Distance which the Ship runs from Place to Place, with a Wheel fixed thro' the Bottom of a Boat towed by the Ship." His plan was rejected by the Board based on three major objections, for which Purshull offers various solutions here. The petition was discovered in a bound volume of similar documents, nearly all of which date with some certainty to 1714 and 1715, and there is no reason to believe that this document is an exception. It is among the earliest examples of lobbying literature, which first began proliferating in the lobby of the House of Commons at the time of the accession of King George I and the British general election of 1715. ESTC records no copies; OCLC lists one, at Yale.
(Item ID: WRCAM39814) $4,750.00