NavList:

Frank you wrote:  By the way, does anyone recall: was this methodology a Weems invention?

I’m not an expert on Weems, so I can’t speak for him, but the techniques might have been used sooner w.r.t. the South Pole.  Amundsen was anxious that there should be no controversy over whether he’d actually reached the exact S Pole, so he ‘boxed’ the spot using a sextant and a method put forward by A R Hinks, a Cambridge astronomer and geographer in a lecture in 1909 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polheim  .  I’ve seen a post 1911 lecture by Hinks on the subject on the www in the annals of somewhere or other, but I can’t remember where.  Another, person worth looking at is Wg Cdr Kenneth Maclure RCAF, who designed the Greenwich Grid for polar air navigation and who was the Senior Observer on the Aries 1 RAF flight to the N Pole immediately after WW2 and who’d been looking at polar navigation from 1942 https://legionmagazine.com/en/2004/01/the-aries-flights-of-1945/ .  DaveP