History of Navigation

History of Navigation:
(the abridged version)

The 1772 voyage of HMS Resolution was to navigation what Wilbur and Orville's little hop was to
aviation. Until that time the practice of navigation was more art than science and mariners sailing out of
sight of land never truly knew their position at sea. Resolution's trip changed that forever. Embarking on
a voyage of exploration, she also served as a test bed for new navigational techniques and instruments.
One device in particular revolutionized navigation, and that was the first accurate sea going clock.

For centuries mariners had plied the oceans. Archeological discoveries show that the Vikings and
Polynesians made epic voyages long before the invention of the magnetic compass or the chronometer.
They left no records of how they accomplished these feats, but they probably used knowledge of the
prevailing winds, the sun and stars to determine direction

After the invention of the compass, mariners could begin reckoning their approximate position by
using their speed and time underway to calculate distance traveled. This "deduced reckoning" wasn't
very accurate but it formed the basis of navigation.

As astronomers began to observe order in the movements of the stars and planets, navigators began
using this information to determine their location. A vessel's latitude was easily found by observing the
height of the noon sun, but a method for finding longitude remained a mystery.

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Since they could find latitude, but not longitude, navigators practiced parallel sailing whereby a
vessel traveled east or west along a parallel of latitude for a preplanned distance. When clear of any
hazards the vessel then headed to it's destination. Because the vessel wasn't taking the most direct route
to her destination, parallel sailing wasted a lot of time, and that meant exposing the crew to prolonged
bouts of Scurvy, a potentially deadly disease caused by the lack of vitamin C in the diet. In addition,
errors in deducing the distance traveled sometimes resulted in disaster. On the foggy night of Oct. 22,
1707, just such a mistake sank 3 British warships, killing 2000 men.

The 4 ships of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell's fleet were parallel sailing past the hazards of the
Scilly Isles on their way back to England. After making an error in judging their
longitude, the Admiral headed north. A common seaman, having secretly kept a
reckoning of the fleet's voyage on his own, approached the Admiral and informed
him of the error. Unfortunately the Admiral was not very grateful, and he promptly
had the upstart seaman hanged - just before the fleet crashed onto the shoals of
Scilly.

This tragedy helped galvanize Europe, England in particular, to find a solution to the longitude
problem. A Royal Committee was formed to gather ideas and a prize of £20,000 was offered to the
person who could determine longitude at sea.

Many schemes were tried. These included:

● VARIATION Some felt that global differences in magnetic variation could be mapped and
used to determine longitude . Unfortunately variation isn't consistent enough to be much help.
● WOUNDED DOGS A proponent of this method suggested that a mysterious substance
called "powder of sympathy" if rubbed on a bandage taken from a wounded dog would cause the
dog to howl in pain, even if the dog were hundreds of miles away from the bandage. If this were
done in England at a predetermined time every day, then the dog's howling would give the
navigator a daily time signal. Of course if the ship were traveling on an extended journey, the dog
would have to be re-injured to keep the wound fresh. Luckily for the dogs, this scheme didn't pan
out.
● TIME SIGNALS This idea called for a massive fleet of vessels to be anchored across the
oceans each responsible for firing a luminous cannon shot high into the sky at a predetermined
time each day so that mariners would have time signals. The sheer cost of such an undertaking,
not to mention the impracticality of anchoring vessels in water thousands of feet deep were just
some of the reasons this idea went into the circular file.
● MOONS OF JUPITER Galileo himself first suggested that navigators could use the
orbiting moons of the planet Jupiter to determine precise time, and thus longitude. This idea
actually worked but the difficulty in making these observations on a pitching vessel made it
impractical.

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● LUNAR DISTANCE Another theoretically possible method measured the angle between the
moon and other celestial bodies to determine precise time. The calculations were difficult and
awkward, sometimes taking up to 4 hours to get a fix.
● CHRONOMETER Finally in 1728, a British clockmaker named John Harrison developed a
clock which was consistently accurate at sea. Because the Earth rotates 15 degrees per hour, if
you know the precise time at the first (or prime) meridian of longitude, the difference between
that time and the navigator's local time (the time at his location) will give him his longitude. At
last the mariner had the ability to easily and consistently determine his exact position.

Today, inexpensive quartz watches give the navigator accurate time and sextants can measure the
altitude of stars to within a fraction of a degree. Electronic devices like Global Positioning System
receivers and LORAN can determine position and calculate courses and distances, and RADAR is used
not only to avoid collision, but to measure distances and plot position.

Navigation has come a long way over the centuries but with all the science involved, there is still
room for art in it's application. Despite the rise of the microprocessor there are many
reasons why today's mariner needs to know and practice the traditional methods of
navigation. Power fails, fuses blow, but most important, it's the captain, not the GPS
instrument that's responsible for the ship and her passengers. Besides, every time we
sight across the compass, every time we plot the running fix, every time we catch
ourselves wondering out loud whether we're really where we think we are, we connect
with those long gone masters who brought us here.

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