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Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation
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About Compass: A Story Of Exploration And Innovation
Product Description A history of the compass describes its pivotal role in early shipping, relating how its development over the course of hundreds of years was marked by thousands of shipwrecks and the disastrous fates of sailors who misused it. 30,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly British writer, photographer and yacht designer Gurney ( The Race to the White Continent) sets his sights on the events leading to the invention Victor Hugo called "the soul of the ship." Centuries ago, a sailor's directional aids were winds and vision. Until the compass was developed in the 12th century, maps and charts could not be used with accuracy, but "the path from lodestone to global positioning systems has been a tortuous one... marked by wrecks and sailors' bones." Gurney begins with the Scilly Islands catastrophe of 1707, when "shoddy compasses" led to the death of 2,000 men in "the worst shipwreck disaster ever suffered by the Royal Navy." Early discoveries that lodestone could magnetize a needle were followed by a parade of devices and experiments. With the circumnavigation of the globe in 1522, "the whole world was magically transformed into an oyster for traders... explorers, and mariners: an oyster ready and waiting to be opened, not with a sword, but by a compass needle." In 1901, the magnetic compass was "unseated from its throne" by the gyrocompass, yet Gurney concludes by noting that despite 20th-century technological upgrades, the magnetic compass remains "a fail-safe measure." An appendix itemizes deviations of the compass needle from the magnetic north; the 20 illustrations include maps, charts, compass cards and woodcuts. Bibliographic notes filling 24 pages indicate Gurney's exhaustive research for this engaging foray into vistas and voyages of the past. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Gurney's history of the compass uses the same event for its overture as Dava Sobel's Longitude (1995)--the 1707 destruction of a British naval squadron because of a navigational error. Contending that the search for a better compass was as important an outcome of the disaster as Sobel's subject, the invention of the nautical chronometer, Gurney chronicles the significant figures in the instrument's perfection. This book partially overlaps Amir Aczel's The Riddle of the Compass (2001), but Gurney's British emphasis distinguishes his work from Aczel's Mediterranean focus. Noting the scientific footing the Elizabethan William Gilbert gave to the study of magnetism, Gurney picks up steam with investigations by Edmond Halley into the most maddening defect of compasses: their deviations under local magnetic fields from the magnetic north pole. Others found that iron nails in a ship compounded the problem, aggravated further when iron supplanted wood in the construction of hulls. Consequently, sea disasters abound in Gurney's narrative, admonishing each would-be slayer of magnetic deviation. An engaging sequence of stories for the maritime set. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Alan Gurney is a yacht designer and photographer turned full-time writer. He is the author of The Race to the White Continent, also from Norton. He lives in Suffolk, England.
