Abstract
MORE than 300 years ago William Barlow, writing of the compasses of his day, said that, though the compass needle was “the most admirable and useful instrument of the whole world,” yet nothing was more “bungerly and absurdly contrived.” How little advance was made in the succeeding two centuries can be gathered from Peter Barlow's remark to the Lords of the Admiralty in 1820 that “the compasses in the British Navy were mere lumber, and ought to be destroyed.” It was Barlow himself who made the first notableimprovements in compasses during the nineteenth century, and his work was the prelude to the important investigations of Airy, Archibald Smith, Kelvin, and others. The practice of “swinging ship”—that is, turning a ship slowly round and noting the deviations of the compass in different positions by taken bearings—was introduced in 1810 by Matthew Flinders, who also invented the use of the “Flinders bar,” a rodof soft iron placed near the compass to correct for changes in the magnetism of the ship due to the vertical component of the earth's magnetism.
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The Mariner's Compass. Nature 105, 44 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105044a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105044a0