Why so much interest in the longitude in the 1990’s?

• The Island of the Day Before (Umberto Eco, 1994): A novel set in the middle 17th century, when European started to tackle the problem of measuring longitude at sea.
• Longitude (Dava Sobel, 1995): A non-fictional book about the history of the longitude problem.
• Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon, 1997): A novel with numerous references to the longitude problem, set at a time when the problem was just solved (about 100 years after Eco’s novel)