Word: sextant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Clinging Twilight. The basic navigation tool is still the time-honored sextant, with which a navigator shoots the stars (or planets, sun or moon) to fix his plane's position above the surface of the spinning earth. Sextants have been vastly improved since the days of sailing ships, and a competent navigator can make a fix that is accurate to within ten miles. If weather permits, he takes about five fixes during a transatlantic crossing...
...receiving equipment. Probably the first to get such equipment will be the nuclear submarines. When they poke a whip antenna above the surface to listen to Transit they will be able to tell where they are within 600 ft. A navigator who shoots the sun or stars with a sextant in good weather does an excellent job if he gets a fix that is accurate within one and a half miles...
...compass, the chronometer, the sextant gradually changed navigation from an art to a science, made mere curiosities of such seafaring geniuses as the early Polynesians-who, according to legend, could smell land far beyond the horizon and head their boats accordingly. In 1960, man's most accurate substitute for weather-dependent celestial navigation is World War II's loran (for long-range aid to navigation), a system of cross-monitored radio signals that is highly expensive and covers only the more frequently traveled parts of the earth. Last week loran seemed destined for obsolescence, as an experimental Navy...
...Clinton T. Nash, peacetime stockbroker and wartime executive officer of the Public Relations Section of ComFleets command, his job, his staff, and the tropical island of Tulura constitute the hub of the naval universe. On his desk rests a three-inch shell casing full of paper clips, and a sextant which he tries in vain to sight; over it hangs the sign, "Think Big!" Nicknamed "Marblehead" because he lacks more than hair, Nash affects British knee-length shorts, carries a swagger stick, and talks a strange mixture of adman and old salt ("My hatch is open for ideas...
...both Mediterranean and Pacific campaigns and currently an assistant editor of LIFE, laces in an implausible South Pacific idyl between a Harvard man and a high-bred island girl named Melora. But at novel's end, old Marblehead is back at stage center, having finally mastered his sextant: "Really it's very simple, isn't it ... unlike Public Relations. Why, ∧any meathead could be a seagoing officer...