Chad’s Reviews > Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation > Status Update

People who never sail, designing compasses for a ship? What possibly could go wrong there!? Although Knight had good intentions, he should have tested his "improved" compass better and admitted faults in his design. Instead we get another example of how nepotism and the bureaucratic process wins out.

So the Royal Observatory was the product of an affair (kinda, sorta)! Who would have thought!

Many could say the section on magnetic variance reinforces the notion of how dangerous it is to employ technology without first fully understanding the scientific principles behind it (a la sailors using compasses and maps with incompatible magnetic corrections), but it also illustrates
that nothing is ever learned without making a few mistakes along the way. Science, like most things, doesn't shine unpolished.

The idea of determining your longitude via measuring your magnetic declination relative to the agonic line is a very neat idea that reminds me of using barometric pressure to determine altitude. Too bad magnetic variance, unlike atmospheric pressure, doesn't change at a predictable and equal rate.

Very interesting to learn about the compass rose developing from a simple diagram of the eight Greek (and later Italian) winds, to an English 32 point system based on a combo of the Germanic North, South, etc. cardinal directions, then finally to today's standard 360 degree model.