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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Method used to compute navigational tables.
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2010 Jan 30, 14:48 -0800
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2010 Jan 30, 14:48 -0800
I just noticed in a volume of H.O. 214 printed in 1940 a statement that the computations were done with seven place logarithms. This shows that the early volumes were computed by hand. This was done as part of the WPA program to put out of work mathematicians to work during the depression. I wonder when these tables started to be calculated with computers? Think of the amount of work doing all these calculations, (720 entries per page, 259 pages per volumes, 186,400 entries per volume) by hand. gl
