Where Am I? (unpublished) We were in serious trouble. This was the first, and thank goodness the only, time in my life that I have ever seen men's faces lined with fear. It was March 1947. My Navy ship, the Donner, was caught in a violent storm and in danger of foundering on the rocky coast of Newfoundland. We had sailed at the beginning of the month from Norfolk, Virginia bound for Gibralter where we were to join a task force visiting Mediterranean ports. World War II was over, but Tito was acting up in Yugoslavia and we were to show the United States flag in Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. Unfortunately the Donner was not seaworthy. At 457 feet in length ‹ older sailors bet newcomers that they couldn't throw a baseball that far ‹ this big ship included an open well deck two-thirds the size of a football field. If water got into that space, it would slosh back and forth, tipping us further and further like a hand-held dishpan, eventually capsizing us. And in its wisdom the Portsmouth Navy Yard had added an additional deck the previous year, hundreds of tons of steel balanced 30 feet above our waterline. That high extra mass made us roll so badly that it was difficult to move about the ship even in good weather. Eating when underway was almost impossible and for most of our crew what did go down soon came back up. Now sailing the shortest great circle route across the North Atlantic, we found ourselves caught in this furious, blizzard-like storm. The driving snow was the least of our problems. Gale force winds created huge waves. When we pitched into one, our forecastle would throw icy water up against us standing watch on the conning station 60 feet higher. And in another part of the ship when we rolled down, I could reach over our quarterdeck bulwark and touch the the wave crests. Any further lean and water would slop over into that well deck. Our captain found that we could only maintain the little stability we had by heading into the wind, but that pointed us directly toward the granite Canadian coast less than a hundred miles away. He reduced speed as much as possible but we had to maintain seaway to keep that heading. If we fell off course too far we would take those waves and swamp, but if we continued in this direction much longer shipwreck seemed inevitable. It was a Hobson's choice. As navigator it was my responsibility to provide a best estimate of our position. With both our radio and radar out and astronomical sights impossible in the vicious storm, I had to hope that our recently installed LORAN equipment would tell us where we were. LORAN is an acronym for Long Range Navigation. Stations around the world send out radio signals at set intervals. By comparing the time it took for those from two stations to reach our ship, I could obtain a chart line. To do this I had to match the period and amplitude of two sine curves on an ocilloscope, record the resulting data, and perform a series of text computations. Three separate measurements produced three lines. Unfortunately they were accurate only to about 30 miles so they never met in a point. Instead they formed a chart triangle in or near which our ship should be located. At first I could not believe the results of my plots over time and I went back over them carefully. But there it was. Despite our heading, they showed us making sternway, actually moving away from the coast. Evidently the storm had created a strong offshore current which, together with the wind, was overpowering our ship's progress toward land. We were not in danger of shipwreck after all. I was delighted and rushed out of the chartroom to spread the news. Unfortunately for their own sense of well being, the captain and the other officers didn't trust the evidence provided by this new-fangled technology. Even when we did not run ashore in the following hours and after another officer confirmed my calculations, they couldn't bring themselves to believe me. It was not until over a week later, the storm long behind us, that they finally began to show some faith in our equipment. By then we had made our landfall in southern Portugal exactly where LORAN had predicted. Today hand-held LORAN or DISTAR calculators provide automatic position readings ‹ no oscilloscope or calculations required ‹ that locate the user within a few feet. We witnessed some of the results of this increased accuracy in the targeting of Desert Strom. But my experience suggests how recently we lacked the ability to locate ourselves at sea with any precision. * * * The standard way to tell where you are at any point on earth is to record your latitude and longitude. For example, those values for the Erie Basin Marina are 42° 53' 6" N and 78° 56' 15" W. (Degrees are divided, just as hours are, into 60 minutes ‹ abbreviated ' ‹ with minutes further divided into 60 seconds ‹ abbreviated ". At the equator a minute of arc is just over a mile, but at our latitude that is significantly reduced in the east-west direction.) Latitude is the angular distance from the equator at 0° toward a pole at 90°; thus Buffalo at 43° N ‹ our winters to the contrary ‹ is only about half way between the equator and the North Pole. Longitude, on the other hand, is the angular distance east or west of a 0° north-south line running through Greenwich, England, a London suburb. Unlike latitude, east and west longitude measures run from 0° to 180°, that 180° line in the western Pacific serving along the unpopulated sections of its length as the International Date Line. The determination of latitude has been a relatively straightforward problem for navigators since the Middle Ages. What is needed is a measure of the angle between the horizon and the Sun at midday or the North Star at night. Sailors use a sextant to take these measurements. Minor calculations and reference to simple tables then give them the required value. But determining longitude has always been far more tricky and thousands of lives were lost before the problem was solved. Until that solution was available, all seamen had to go on was a process, which is still used, called dead reckoning: you estimate, as best you can, your speed and direction and plot your location accordingly. Unfortunately currents and winds can make those calculations very inaccurate. On my adventure in the North Atlantic, for example, dead reckoning placed us on Newfoundland rocks long before the storm's violence reduced allowing us to veer away. * * * On October 22, 1707, British Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, returning to England from Gibralter with a squadron of troop ships, encountered thick fog extending out from the Bay of Biscay. Although the navigators of his fleet agreed that he was off the northwest coast of France; instead he was fast approaching England itself. Within minutes, four of his five ships crashed into the sharp rocks of the Scilly Isles and immediately sank. Over 2000 men were lost. The continuing uproar that followed this and similar tragic events led the British Parlaiment in 1714 to offer a reward of 20,000 pounds, the equivalent of $12,000,000 today, to solve the problem of longitude determination. This was in spite of the fact, as reference to an atlas will show, that the Shovell shipwreck was equally a misidentification of latitude. The prize was awarded ‹ finally, grudgingly, and even then only partially ‹ a half century later when a journeyman carpenter turned clockmaker, John Harrison, provided an elegant solution. He built the first timepiece that would withstand the buffeting of a sea voyage together with the attendant extremes of temperature, pressure, and humidity, while remaining accurate. In building his clocks ‹ there were eventually four of them, each a striking improvement on its predecessor ‹ Harrison completely revised the mechanics of time keeping. Before Harrison, clocks had required pendulums and most were accurate only to within several minutes per day even under the best of conditions! Even at sea Harrison's clocks varied by only seconds a month. And among the many things this creative man invented in support of his clock building were ball bearings and the bi-metallic strip that is the centerpiece of many modern thermostats. I once visited Greenwich specifically to examine Harrison's clocks in England's National Maritime Museum. It was well worth my trip for they are exquisite works of art. All but one are in full operation and tick away the hours today. These three are self cleaning. Only his final much smaller " watch" remains still: the cleaning it would require every three years might cause injury to its intricate works. Later in the courtyard outside the museum I stood astride the 0° prime meridian. The story of Harrison's achievement is well told in the excellent new book, "Longitude," written by Dava Sobel and published by Walker and Company. This small volume should be in every school library, not only to record this interesting history with its associated science, but also to provide as a model for youngsters this shy but resolute, self-taught man who faced up to a government unwilling to meet its obligations and outdid anyone Horatio Alger ever invented. * * * How did Harrison's clock solve the problem? The answer is not only quite simple, but it also reminds us how our world works. We know that the earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. In that time period it turns through the full 360° of longitude. Simple division tells us further that it passes through 15° per hour. Earthbound, we don't sense that rotation; instead we feel that the sun moves around us at that rate. The navigator's local noon is the time when that "moving" sun reaches its highest elevation. He determines it by peering carefully through the divided window of an instrument called a sextant and recording the instant when the sun's angle with the horizon is greatest. It is important not to confuse this navigator's local time with our Eastern Standard Time which remains the same over our entire time zone. Standard time keeps ours the same as Syracuse and Erie; the navigator's time is only an abstract construct useful ‹ as we will see ‹ for other calculations. Only in the exact east-west center of a time zone, in our case at 75° W (the longitude of Herkimer, NY), do these two noons coincide. Harrison's solution to the longitude problem was to provide an accurate clock that carried Greenwich time. When on shipboard you then determine the difference between local noon and the corresponding time shown on that clock of that exact moment in Greenwich. For example, suppose your Greenwich clock shows 2:20 p.m. at the same time your sextant indicates local noon. That would mean that you are 2 1/3 hours or ‹ multiplying by that 15° per hour ‹ at longitude 65° W. If your sun sight also told you that your latitude was 32° N, you would know that you were near Bermuda. Sextant measurements are recorded to minutes of arc in order to provide as accurate measures as possible, but they still leave your location only determined within a few miles. * * * A few months ago I joined Tom Franklin on his fishing boat cruising out of Wilson Harbor. As we entered the open lake, Franklin turned his LORAN on and it immediately flashed our position, 43° 19' 8.1" N, 78° 50' 1.3" W, accurate to within a few feet. He punched a button to enter that location. That way the equipment could give us a return course from wherever we wandered. Franklin told me that he had once used this feature to lead a number of boats back to safety through a suddenly descended thick fog. Clearly his instrument is orders of magnitude ahead of the one I operated 50 years ago, just as that device was ahead of the ones that had preceeded it for centuries. Biologists and hunters now use portable versions of this equipment, purchased in local sporting goods stores, to pinpoint their position in the countryside on topographic maps. It is interesting to note, however, that the accuracy of these instruments is limited by government interference. For public use, the satellite DISTAR values that provide those locations are adjusted slightly by a randomizing process to allow location accurate only to a few hundred feet. Our military doesn't want anyone targeting us in the same way we were able to target Iraqi bunkers during Desert Storm. We trade those few feet of accuracy for additional protection in these sadly threatening times.