Navigation on Wood: Wooden navigational instruments 1590–1731: an analysis of early modern Western instruments for celestial navigation, their origins, mathematical concepts and accuracies

摘要

The history of navigation has always been the history of the instruments of navigation as well, especially since the gradual change from an analogue art relying on experience and perfect acquaintance with the sea to a digital science based on measurement. This development towards relying on numbers rather than texts (memorized or written) paved the way to turning instruments that had been known for centuries into tools for pilots, the astrolabe and the crossstaff being perfect examples for this development as they had existed and been described long before their conversion and introduction into nautical use at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century.