Word: sextant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...made the most of ancient astronomical findings, the U.S. Navy began studying radio astronomy to see whether a celestial radio signal might be something to steer by. Recently, the Naval Research Laboratory, working with the Collins Radio Co. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, revealed some details of a radio sextant that can navigate ships by radio waves from space...
...fitted out a 23-ft. Bermuda-rigged sloop, Felicity Ann, with a 5-h.p. diesel engine, a radio receiving set, pressure kerosene stove, sextant, compass and chronometer. In May she set sail from Plymouth Harbor. Plagued by storms, she was forced to land in Brittany, Spain, Gibraltar, Casablanca. From Casablanca, she headed for the Canary Islands, was overdue 18 days and given up for lost before she finally made Las Palmas in the Canaries. Last week, 65 days later-and eight months after she started-Ann dropped anchor at Portsmouth, Dominica...
...graduated from grade school with honors, enrolled in the New York Nautical School, with his sextant took a sight on success. Says Manning: "I was a fanatic on navigation." He was the smallest in his class, but he was also smart and tough. Two years and many fistfights later, he shipped out on the St. Paul as a $15-a-month seaman. With the new Marcq St.-Hilaire navigating system learned in school, a refinement of which is now in common use in the Navy, Manning soon distinguished himself as a navigator, and was made quartermaster the second trip...
According to the Cambridge catalogue, MS. 75 was supposed to be a treatise on the astrolabe (forebear of the sextant) by an astronomer named Simon Bredon. But, in all the 400-odd years the manuscript had been on the Peterhouse shelves, apparently no one had ever bothered to examine it carefully. The astronomical tables it contained were dated 1391 to 1393. Yet, as Derek Price well knew, Bredon had died...
...buying an improved instrument, the Zerbee Celestial Fix Finder. A nightmare of gears and scales and dials, it looks something like the dream sweetheart of a mechanical monster. It has talent, however. When a navigator wants to find the position of his ship at night, he observes with a sextant the position of two stars. By setting dials and fiddling with scales, he feeds this information and a few other figures into the machine. Barring errors in observations, the machine tells him the position of the ship, accurate to one mile...