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George, sorry, but I cannot understand you:

> In those days, tables for printing were set by hand, and there was much
> scope for things to go wrong. I have read of other cases of printed errors,
> and we can't reject the possibility of a whole column of them.

If I can imagine the process of preparing the book by hand, the digits of
table values were set one by one. Accordingly, I can understand a casual
printing error in one digit of one logarithm, but what mental process could
cause the error in a whole vertical column, while adjacent columns should be
correct?

And two following paragraphs seem to be contradictory:


> Nor can we reject the possibility that Slocum did something wrong, got a
> silly answer, and then found a way to "fiddle" things to get a better one
> by altering a set of numbers in a table. But Slocum would be asking for
> trouble in doing that, because it would be so easy to check it
> retrospectively. Publishing it in a book, which would be widely read by his
> seagoing contemporaries, he was surely aware that the first question
> another mariner would ask him would be "What was the table that was wrong,
> and what were those errors?", so that they could correct their own copies.

Therefore it would have been dangerous for Slocum to lay false claim for
correcting a table value?


> I agree with Herbert that his claim to have detected, and then corrected,
> an error in a table was a remarkable feat: so remarkable as to make it hard
> to accept.

Or not?


Jan Kalivoda

   

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