NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: The Old vs. The New
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Jan 21, 21:29 EST
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Jan 21, 21:29 EST
Geoff B wrote:
"I much appreciated Frank Reed's comparison of Old and New. "
Thanks. :-)
And wrote:
"A friend who sailed out of Liverpool as a cadet with Blue Funnel line in the sixties tells that the master insisted that all sight reductions should be done using spherical trig calculations rather than the 'Air Reduction' methods which were available, but which he despised. He is said to have thrown copies of manuals (I suppose Marine Reduction tables) over the side. "
I can't recall where, but I've read that there was unusually strong disdain for tabular methods in Britain after the war. In the US, they apparently became very popular during the Second World War.
And wrote:
"For seamen with limited numeracy learning one method was a major investment and a treasured achievement. It
would be the exceptional master who was prepared to adopt a 'new' method in his working time. "
Absolutely. This is the key to the conservatism in the development of celestial navigation. And it's also an example of the old axiom 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Before they would even consider learning a new method, practical navigators had to see solid evidence that a new method worked with absolute reliability and provided some clear and obvious advantage. They had lives and money on the line (not necessarily in that order!) when they raised their sextants and took their sights. Given that celestial navigation today (in 2004) is no longer a primary means of navigating a vessel, it's much easier for modern navigation enthusiasts to experiment with different reduction techniques, historical methods, and exotica like lunars.
And wrote:
"Publications have to support practice. Data supporting lunar methods were published in the Nautical Almanac until, when was it, 1917? "
Up to 1912 in the US almanac and 1906 (??) in the British almanac. By these late dates, lunars were thoroughly obsolete from the point of view of practical navigation.
Donald Treworgy, the director of the planetarium at Mystic Seaport (where I have occasionally worked) often comments on the very slow process of technological transition in the history of navigation before the late 20th century. Today it seems a little odd that lunars were retained in the almanacs for so long, but it wasn't that unusual. In Mystic Seaport's collection (and on-display at the planetarium), there is a back-staff which was made in 1785 in nearby New London. By today's standards of rapid obsolescence, you might expect that all navigators would be using the latest instruments and the latest designs back then. Back-staffs were still being manufactured nearly a century after they should have been displaced.
And Geoff B concluded:
"A little by the way: despite the portrayal of Maskelyne in Dava Sobel's book I have always thought of him as a giant of a man. Devising and organising the calculation by hand of the Nautical Almanac to be a usable tool for navigators seems to me a supreme achievement. He produced and made available to all a working device. For all Harrison's genius it took others to make chronometers equally available to all. "
Yes, I agree. Sobel's main error/mis-interpretation in "Longitude" is that she fails to see these two inventions (the lunar distance method and timepieces) in the context of their time. Sobel portrays Maskelyne as a sort of a luddite, yet he was hardly the only person in the late 18th century who was more comfortable trusting the "clock in the heavens" over an "infernal machine". This was the dawn of the industrial age. Timepieces like chronometers were the very first complex machines that people trusted with their very lives. Still, that said, Sobel's "Longitude" is a fine contribution to the story of navigation --a good place to begin. Just don't stop at the beginning!
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois
"I much appreciated Frank Reed's comparison of Old and New. "
Thanks. :-)
And wrote:
"A friend who sailed out of Liverpool as a cadet with Blue Funnel line in the sixties tells that the master insisted that all sight reductions should be done using spherical trig calculations rather than the 'Air Reduction' methods which were available, but which he despised. He is said to have thrown copies of manuals (I suppose Marine Reduction tables) over the side. "
I can't recall where, but I've read that there was unusually strong disdain for tabular methods in Britain after the war. In the US, they apparently became very popular during the Second World War.
And wrote:
"For seamen with limited numeracy learning one method was a major investment and a treasured achievement. It
would be the exceptional master who was prepared to adopt a 'new' method in his working time. "
Absolutely. This is the key to the conservatism in the development of celestial navigation. And it's also an example of the old axiom 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Before they would even consider learning a new method, practical navigators had to see solid evidence that a new method worked with absolute reliability and provided some clear and obvious advantage. They had lives and money on the line (not necessarily in that order!) when they raised their sextants and took their sights. Given that celestial navigation today (in 2004) is no longer a primary means of navigating a vessel, it's much easier for modern navigation enthusiasts to experiment with different reduction techniques, historical methods, and exotica like lunars.
And wrote:
"Publications have to support practice. Data supporting lunar methods were published in the Nautical Almanac until, when was it, 1917? "
Up to 1912 in the US almanac and 1906 (??) in the British almanac. By these late dates, lunars were thoroughly obsolete from the point of view of practical navigation.
Donald Treworgy, the director of the planetarium at Mystic Seaport (where I have occasionally worked) often comments on the very slow process of technological transition in the history of navigation before the late 20th century. Today it seems a little odd that lunars were retained in the almanacs for so long, but it wasn't that unusual. In Mystic Seaport's collection (and on-display at the planetarium), there is a back-staff which was made in 1785 in nearby New London. By today's standards of rapid obsolescence, you might expect that all navigators would be using the latest instruments and the latest designs back then. Back-staffs were still being manufactured nearly a century after they should have been displaced.
And Geoff B concluded:
"A little by the way: despite the portrayal of Maskelyne in Dava Sobel's book I have always thought of him as a giant of a man. Devising and organising the calculation by hand of the Nautical Almanac to be a usable tool for navigators seems to me a supreme achievement. He produced and made available to all a working device. For all Harrison's genius it took others to make chronometers equally available to all. "
Yes, I agree. Sobel's main error/mis-interpretation in "Longitude" is that she fails to see these two inventions (the lunar distance method and timepieces) in the context of their time. Sobel portrays Maskelyne as a sort of a luddite, yet he was hardly the only person in the late 18th century who was more comfortable trusting the "clock in the heavens" over an "infernal machine". This was the dawn of the industrial age. Timepieces like chronometers were the very first complex machines that people trusted with their very lives. Still, that said, Sobel's "Longitude" is a fine contribution to the story of navigation --a good place to begin. Just don't stop at the beginning!
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois
