A rather stylized copy of the original
In the old days of naval navigation, sailors would have to rely on the stars to direct them wherever they needed to go. Even the invention of the compass could only help as to telling you where North is, but not necessarily where you currently are. To do that, you had to stare directly at a celestial body, usually the Sun or Polaris depending on the time of day, and give an estimate as to it's angle versus the horizon, this is used to determine latitude. Seems simple, right? Finding longitude at the time, meanwhile, was almost impossible. It required guessing at the distance and angle of the moon to some other large mass body, which at a glance, especially on cloudy or new moon nights, is simply unreasonable to expect any decent results from. This is what prompted the need for a device that could alleviate this concern in the form of the Octant, the predecessor to the Sextant.
Cue the entrance of the Octant's inventor... er, inventors. Funnily enough, two different people have claimed to have invented the octant at around the same time, and the evidence points to the conclusion that they had invented it separately without any knowledge of the other. These people in question are Thomas Godfrey (an American optician, and according to sources from after his death, someone who legitimately had OCD), and John Hadley (an English mathematician). With the octant's invention, a sailor could simply see through the scope vertically and with the mathematical compass attached to it, determining the sun's angle was easy as pie. While still more difficult, determining longitude became magnitudes easier due to the Octant being able to be used as ruler as well. With this invention, navigation became something far easier compared to before it's inception.
I'll admit, I found it funny that such an important invention was "invented" by two people simultaneously. It reminds me of my own favorite past time, writing stories, where in I would try to write what I thought was a unique idea, but the moment I showed it to friends, I would inevitably be redirected to another author who did a story based on the same exact idea. Perhaps creativity is dead, but at least coincidence is funny occasionally.
Image Credit: "Octant de Ramsden" obtained via Wikimedia Commons
This reminds me of something we talked about in my plant identification class recently: what happens when two people "discover" the same plant? With plant taxonomy you look at records and name the plant after who was really the first to identify it, but with inventions you can't pinpoint it that clearly. I wonder how they felt about both being granted the ownership for inventing the Octant?
ReplyDelete