Compass
Subtitle: A Story of Exploration and Innovation
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: June 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780393050738
First sentence: The cry of''Breakers ahead!" was the first warning that the navigating officers had made a dreadful mistake in their dead reckoning, or, in the mordant Spanish equivalent, their navegacion de fantasia.
Description: A history of the compass describes its pivotal role in early shipping, relating how its development over the course of hundreds of years was marked by thousands of shipwrecks and the disastrous fates of sailors who misused it.
Table of contents: title: Preface and Acknowledgements; title: Prologue; label: Chapter 1
title: Dead Reckoning; label: Chapter 2
title: Needle and Stone; label: Chapter 3
title: The Rose of the Winds; label: Chapter 4
title: Variation and Dip; label: Chapter 5
title: Edmond Halley, Polymath; label: Chapter 6
title: To Compass the Globe; label: Chapter 7
title: Halleyan Lines; label: Chapter 8
title: Dr. Gowin Knight and His Magnetic Machine; label: Chapter 9
title: Knight's Compass; label: Chapter 10
title: The Shocks of Tempestuous Seas; label: Chapter 11
title: Any Old Iron, Any Old Iron; label: Chapter 12
title: The Book of Bearings; label: Chapter 13
title: The Flinders Bar; label: Chapter 14
title: Soft Iron, Hard Iron; label: Chapter 15
title: "An Evil So Pregnant with Mischef"; label: Chapter 16
title: Deviation, the Hydra-Headed Monster; label: Chapter 17
title: The "Inextricable Entangled Web"; label: Chapter 19
title: Thomson's Compass and Binnacle; label: Chapter 20
title: The Selling of a Compass; label: Chapter 21
title: A Question of Liquidity; label: Epilogue:
title: From Needle to Spinning Top; label: Appendix:
title: Deviation; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index