Presidential Address. Navigation: A Changing Trade

Abstract

As the title indicates, this paper is principally concerned with navigation as a profession, rather than the essential activity of finding the way there and back again that is continually practised by the whole of humankind. By a profession, I mean the acquisition of a set of defined skills through training and the exercising of those skills as a way of earning a living for most, if not all, of a working lifetime. And looking at the profession of navigation, two interesting facts emerge; one is that it is not a particularly old profession - a century and a half, maybe. The second is that it is not likely to get very much older, at least in the form we know it today.