NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Did transistors transform celestial navigation?
From: Wolfgang Köberer
Date: 2018 Jul 14, 02:10 -0700
From: Wolfgang Köberer
Date: 2018 Jul 14, 02:10 -0700
Frank,
I wonder where your information that „Chronometers were the norm and nearly universal at the high-end in the British maritime world (Royal Navy etc.) by about 1815“ comes from. The authors that have researched the rise and decline of the chronometer (Forbes, Nockolds, May, Davies) tell us that for instance in 1821 the Royal Navy only owned 130 chronometers – forty-three were on exploration or surveying, while only fifty-one of the seventy-four vessels employed abroad carried Admiralty chronometers; the only vessel in home waters – by the way – was the Royal Yacht.
And is your statement that chronometers were the norm in the US by 1835 the result of a thorough survey of ship’s logs?
Best
Wolfgang
