Word: sextant
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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...
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...
Another demonstration of infra-red use occurred last week on the roof of England's Croydon Airdrome control tower. There Paul Humphrey MacNeil of Huntington, L. I. showed his infra-red sextant. Navigators locate their position at sea or in the air by determining how high the sun is above the horizon. They "shoot the sun" through the eyepiece of a sextant. If the day is cloudy, they cannot see the sun, although they may know its approximate location. The MacNeil sextant is connected with an amplifier sensitive to the sun's infra-red rays. Those rays...
Busier than Pilot Post as the Winnie Mac streaked over the water was Harold Gatty. Cramped into a tiny space behind a wall of special fuel tanks he alternately poked his sextant through a port in the roof, scribbled his computations, passed written directions to the pilot, and pumped gasoline up into the wing tanks. Hard work, but nothing compared to the ordeal of last summer when he and Harold Bromley got i.200 mi. from Japan in an attempt flight to the U. S. and then had to fight their way back to shore with a broken exhaust ring spewing...