Word: compasses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Computations by which navigators determine their position from sextant observations of the altitude (elevation above the horizon) and azimuth (true bearing by compass) of heavenly bodies may take up to 15 minutes. In airplanes traveling 200 m.p.h. such computations are out of date by the time they are made. The Navy's Hydrographic Office published tables last year covering latitudes of 30 to 39 degrees, from which navigators could check their position in a few seconds...
Incredible was the bare-faced yarn Corrigan told: "I left New York to return to Los Angeles, but by an unfortunate mistake I set my compass wrong, and when I got up above the clouds the visibility was very bad* When I had flown 25 hours I came down through the clouds and I was in Ireland...
...down out of the air at neighboring Roosevelt Field in a 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane with an old Wright J-6 motor that could turn up only 95 miles an hour. By modern standards the ship was a crate, but in it, with nothing to fly by but a compass, a bit of a map and the beam in his eye, 31-year-old Douglas P. Corrigan of Los Angeles had flown the 2,700 miles to New York nonstop. A vacation trip, he said, and a fairly pleasant one, from his job at the Northrop Corp. aircraft works...
Thomas L. Thurlow, lent for the flight by the U. S. Army; Flight Engineer Edward Lund, and Radio Engineer Richard Stoddart. Flier Hughes was guided by the most reassuring set of flying gadgets ever packed into a private airplane. Kept on his course by a homing radio compass, another taking bearings from ships at sea, and a new periscopic drift indicator perfected by Lieutenant Thurlow, Flier Hughes let a gyro-pilot do most of the flying, chatted every half hour or so over a powerful radio transmitter to a base at the New York World's Fair that...
...Cheshire Cat's, perhaps the most famous smile in the world is that on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa Gioconda, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Dr. Maurice Goldblatt, Chicago art connoisseur, believes her expression is a tremendous trick achieved with a compass, the ends of the lips being turned up in arcs which, if extended, would precisely meet the corners of the eyes...