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Gary wrote

I posted the entire 1599 book by Edward Wright. It is a fun read he was a very interesting man.

Thanks for that. I wonder if Wright will answer some of my questions should I manage to read it all? Here are some of those questions:

Will the meridional parts table go down in history as the world's longest running navigation table? I exclude logs & trig functions as these surely pre-date meridional parts? The former are needed to compute mps. I donot know if mps are in the latest editions of Norie or Bowditch.

Did mathematicians  devise the gudermannian function and then someone had a brain wave and realised the function solved the mercator chart problem? Or was the gudermannian  discovered/invented/devised dureing research into the mercator problem?

David C