![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/files\/2013\/04\/shootingthesun.jpg\" "\\"shootingthesun\\"")
<\/a>High school student Senta Osoling learning to use a sextant, 1942. Photo: Alfred T. Palmer<\/a>, Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n Our wiz-bang gadgets are making the miraculous seem commonplace these days.<\/span><\/p>\n Which is one reason I wanted to call this to your attention:\u00a0“Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There”<\/a>.<\/p>\n This new, permanent exhibition opened April 12 at the National Air and Space Museum<\/a> in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n And what is the secret to finding exactly where you are on earth? Well, as Heather Goss put it, on Smithsonian’s Air & Space blog, The Daily Planet<\/em><\/a>, “You’re going to need a clock”.<\/p>\n This sundial birdbath only tells time after a fashion. Navigation needed real timepieces. (photo by L. Martin)<\/p><\/div>\n An exhibition\u00a0overview by Edward Rothstein<\/a> for the New York Times brought this to my attention. I love exhibits that try to convey the scope of critically important\u00a0accomplishments like this. Because we tend to forget just how hard this particular problem was.<\/p>\n As Rothstein wrote:<\/p>\n The history of navigation is in fact a history of getting lost. Or worse. It is also, as the exhibition shows, a history of gadgets that struggle to take some measure of the world, organizing it, dividing it, turning each spot into a crossroads of invented measurements.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note that phrase “invented measurements”, because that is how modern man gets this job done. My head explodes when considering these concepts, but you could say that’s the gist of it: time as an invented measurement, coupled with the creation of an invented grid – and that is how we map the world. (These things seem so “real” but to some extent they are artificial constructs. Birds do the same thing perfectly well without clocks, thanks anyway.)<\/p>\n Today, it’s a snap to have GPS at one’s fingertips, providing pin-point placement with zero effort. But think – marvel, if you will – at the heavy mental lifting that went into defining (then solving) this problem. Dreaming up time as a concept and then treating time\u00a0as something to be measured<\/a>. The amazing ingenuity\u00a0it took to\u00a0invent so many different devices<\/a> to measure distance (and time) and then link them to establish location.\u00a0Quoting Rothstein’s article again:<\/span><\/p>\n The subject of navigation itself intersects several academic disciplines. The exhibition is a collaboration between two branches of the Smithsonian, the\u00a0National Museum of American History<\/a>\u00a0and the National Air and Space Museum. There are four curators, each involved in a different part of the story: Paul Ceruzzi, aerospace electronics; Roger Connor, aviation; Andrew Johnston, geography; and Carlene Stephens, timekeeping. It is a measure of the centrality of the subject \u2014 and the general ignorance about it \u2014 that an entire museum could have been devoted to it. Indeed, the show\u2019s achievement is not that it makes the subject seem easy \u2014 for that, we can just play with Google Maps or Google Earth \u2014 but that it reveals that it is difficult beyond imagining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As students of this topic already know, figuring out north and south on the globe was the easy part – because that could be determined by checking location against the sun and stars, like Polaris. The devil was in determining east and west (longitude). That really couldn’t be solved until better timepieces were invented. (Which did happen, across centuries.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Here’s another blog about <\/span>visiting Greenwich, England<\/a> (with a photo of the prime meridian!) and the Longitude Act of 1714, establishing a prize of \u00a320,000 (perhaps 3 million in today’s dollars) for the invention of a way to measure longitude at sea with some accuracy. Here’s more about the the inventor and device that eventually took the prize in 1773: John Harrison and his H-4 clock.<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>