NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: DR, was: No Lunars Era
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 Dec 7, 11:26 -0700
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 Dec 7, 11:26 -0700
On 7 Dec 2004 at 0:51, Trevor J. Kenchington wrote: > A fair point but perhaps not a relevant one: "Dead Reckoning" seems to date > back to the 17th century at least. Anyone have an OED to hand? That might > establish the first recorded use of the term. From the online OED Dead Reckoning The estimation of a ship's position from the distance run by the log and the courses steered by the compass, with corrections for current, leeway, etc., but without astronomical observations. Hence dead LATITUDE (q.v.), that computed by dead reckoning. 1613 M. RIDLEY Magn. Bodies 147 Keeping a true, not a dead reckoning of his course. 1760 PEMBERTON in Phil. Trans. LI. 911 The latitude exhibited by the dead reckoning of the ship. 1840 R. H. DANA Bef. Mast xxxii. 124 We had drifted too much to allow of our dead reckoning being anywhere near the mark. 1891 Nature 3 Sept., The log, which for the first time enabled the mariner to carry out his dead-reckoning with confidence, is first described in Bourne's ?Regiment for the Sea?, which was published in 1577. 1917 BOSANQUET & CAMPBELL Navigation for Aerial Navigators i. 4 In aerial navigation..Dead Reckoning is the position arrived at as calculated from the estimated track and the estimated speed made good over the ground. Ibid. 5 These data enable us to find a Dead Reckoning position. 1935 C. G. BURGE Compl. Bk. Aviation 477/1 Dead reckoning..is a compromise between pilotage and navigation. [there is no entry for "ded reckoning"] Ken Muldrew.