Early Pole Star Tables

Abstract

E. G. R. Taylor's interesting and noteworthy book The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England shows that navigation was at first based on the experience of practitioners; men of science were too remote from practical requirements. There was a big gap between what interested them and what the seaman could understand and apply.

Early Pole Star Tables

“…1 The implication was that scientists were not concerned with seamen's problems nor seamen with obtaining scientific help. I THINK Professor Taylor and I are at cross-purposes in our discussion of the influence of scientists upon the art of navigation before the nineteenth century.…”

“…* Dr. Freiesleben expressed the view that until 1800, 'when our technical age began', there was a big gap between what interested scientists and what the seaman could understand and apply, that men of science were too remote from practical requirements. 1 The implication was that scientists were not concerned with seamen's problems nor seamen with obtaining scientific help. I pointed out that whatever the situation in the eighteenth century might have been, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries improvements of a radical nature were made by scientists, working with and for seamen, in the means of practising the art of navigation, in particular by English scientists working in the latter part of the period under the aegis of Gresham College and the East India Company.…”