Word: sextant
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...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...
...patrolling near Spitzbergen gave him a radio call as he whisked past, reported back that Captain Blair was right on course. Hour after hour, the Mustang bored through the blue-grey sunlit haze over the icecap. Blair sat hunched behind his oxygen mask occasionally shooting the sun with a sextant...
...machine guns, pore over weather charts and navigation logarithms. Result: after seven years in fighters, he was called from Hawaii to fly the first of the Army's Flying Fortresses because he was the rare Army airman who could find his way around with a navigator's sextant and chart. From then on his career was set as a big-plane...