Word: sextant
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Every navigator loves his sextant. He bought it when he was still at school, paid perhaps $100 for it. When he is signed on a new ship, it is assumed he will bring his own sextant; it is bad nautical manners to borrow another man's. It may be more or less ornate but it is much the same as the sextant that John Hadley invented in 1731.* Every noon at sea he goes up on the bridge and measures the angle the sun and the horizon make in the instrument, which gives him by logarithmic formula his position. When...
...thermoelectric sextant, using infra-red rays, invented by Paul Humphrey Macneil. The infra-red rays are in the long-wave end of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are really heat waves, capable of penetrating clouds. The Macneil Sextant has a curved reflector that collects and potently focuses infra-red rays on a thermocouple, two pieces of metal which when heated even one-millionth of 1° give off a tiny flow of electricity. This flow is enormously amplified, measured by a galvanometer. When the curved reflector is pointed directly at the sun, the flow of electricity is greatest and the navigator...
Inventor Macneil began his pursuit of infra-red rays as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. During the War he considered how to apply his researches to a nautical instrument, fixed on the sextant. Because no U. S. workmen could make the delicate apparatus required, he went to Holland. In February 1931 he guided the Mauretania across the Atlantic with his thermoelectric sextant, which was later adopted by the British Admiralty. Last week he announced he was ready to begin commercial production. A ship will need but one thermoelectric sextant which will cost about $2,000 instead...
Well and chipper, the crew of the Curlew explained their difficulties. Captain Nat Blum, like his sailors, had never been out of sight of land before the race. Navigator Rosenberg had never taken a sight with a sextant and his instrument, a borrowed one, was improperly adjusted. Said Captain Blum: "We got off our course directly the race started and when we tried to put back, the wind shifted. This delayed us ... but we always knew where we were." One of the Curlew's crew, Attorney Benjamin Theeman, returned home by train. The others, after ramming and smashing...
...present time; the latter including physical equipment, field methods, technical background and morale. The technicological courses include a half year each in elementary and advanced topographic and hydrographic-surveying. Another course is in field astronomy, a science which is chiefly valuable in the determination of fixed points, employing theodolite, sextant and astrolabe. Cartography provides training in map projections and drawings, sketching in the field and converting to office maps...