Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
Navigation Meets Science
Crusading knights returned from the Middle East with new knowledge ac-
quired from Islamic peoples, and from that time many of the famous univer-
sities of Europe can be dated: Padua, Paris, Oxford, and Verona. By the fif-
teenth century, educated people were beginning to lose faith in the wisdom
of the ancients and in conventional beliefs. After all, medical wisdom had
been shown to be woefully inadequate during the recent Black Death pan-
demic; Ptolemy was wrong about the impossibility of reaching India by sea;
the recent introduction of gunpowder showed that substances could be com-
bined in ways unforeseen by the ancient philosophers. Gunpowder, indeed,
was a product of practical experimentation, not philosophy—so perhaps such
experimentation could lead to advances in other areas, such as navigation.
New ideas could be promulgated faster than ever before through another
new invention: the printing press. Europe was gearing itself up for the scien-
tific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
navigational database (to use a modern term) very similar to the Italian
portolan charts. Such data and charts were combined beautifully, in what
many pilots at the time and for generations afterward considered the defi-
nitive form, by a Dutch cartographer, Lucas Waghenaer. His book, trans-
lated into English in 1588, was referred to simply as Wagonners , and it
guided many an English navigator across the Atlantic to the newly formed
American colonies. 21
Mariners were learning to sink the land, and yet, despite the disorien-
tating uniformity of the open ocean, they could make a reasonable estimate
of their latitude and bearing, though not yet their longitude.
21. For more on this interesting period of navigation and exploration history, see Arnold
(2002), Bawlf (2003), Cunli√e (2002), Dunn (1989), Hakes (2009), Kelsey (2000), Love
(2006), Mason (1962), Papenfuse and Coale (2005), and Thrower (1984). I especially
recommend Bedini (1998). For a detailed account of the scramble for control of the Spice
Islands, see Milton (1999).
 
 
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