NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Norm Goldblatt
Date: 2013 Jan 10, 16:24 -0800
Thanks Bendan- I'll check it out. This is turning out to be quite a delightful adventure. It all started with Slocum's story about reconciling his dead reckoning with celestial by proposing and finding an error in his trig tables. I questioned the veracity of the story on this board a few months ago and got so many wonderful responses. It's a wonderful story if it is true, and it is being worked into a theatrical one man show I'm performing about my love affair with math and science. I thought what better artifact than a contemporary (to Slocum) sextant. Seems like I overshot antiquity by about 70 years, but it's probably close to what he used. Maybe some of the group might even know what he actually used.
I live about 1/2 mile from the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum, http://www.computerhistory.org . They have one of two Babbage Difference Engines,http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/, which can be used to calculate the value of any 7th order polynomial to 31 places and then, with no human intervention, make a printing plate. It is truly a marvel, and Slocum's story fits right in.
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