Word: compasses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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About the technical operation of well-run TWA, Frye and Richter today have few worries as they fly the line from San Francisco to Newark. But they never look at the instrument board on a line run without seeing on the compass card a sharp reminder of a TWA deficiency: all its routes run east and west. For TWA is, more strictly than its two coast-to-coast competitors (United and American), a transcontinental line, a long thin line with no feeders to bring in side traffic...
...contrasting conduct of a captain who, last week, sank the British sugar freighter Olivegrove, 200 miles southwest of Bantry, Ireland. This captain ordered the freighter to heave to (by shots over her bow), and to disembark her men in lifeboats. He then lay to, checked the castaways' compass, offered them a tow toward the nearest land. After scuttling the lifeless Olivegrove with one well-aimed torpedo, he stood by her survivors for nine hours until help neared (U. S. liner Washington). To attract it, he put lights on the lifeboats and fired two red rockets before taking his tactful...
...Sperry gyro companies is lean, blue-eyed Annapolis-man Reginald Everett Gillmor, who was commissioned an ensign in 1909 just in time for assignment to U. S. S. Delaware, the Navy's first dreadnaught. Delaware was also the first battlewagon to be equipped with a Sperry gyroscopic compass and before he had walked many tours on the quarterdeck, Ensign Gillmor knew as much about it as the two electricians who had installed it: Thomas A. Morgan (now president of Sperry Corp.) and O. B. Whitaker (now Sperry Gyro's marine manager...
...True North" is the direction in which one points to the North Pole, but compass needles point in the direction of the magnetic pole, which is on the Boothia Peninsula in Northern Canada. Hence, only when a compass is roughly on a prolongation of the line from the geographical pole to the magnetic pole does it point true north. From other points in the world the needle, pointing to magnetic north, makes an angle with true north, and that angle mariners call variation. In the Pacific Ocean the needle points as much as 30° east of the geographical pole...
Mariners who correct their compasses for variation also have to correct them for deviation, a local error caused by magnetic metals (chiefly iron, steel) in their own craft. The Research is unique because she is nonmagnetic in every possible detail, will have infinitesimal local deviation errors. A throwback to the wooden-ship days, she has a hull of teak, bolts, girders and anchor chain of aluminum bronze. Her cooking utensils and tableware are aluminum; her four Diesels (three for auxiliary power, one for propulsion in calms) are of bronze and aluminum. Her only steel is in their crankshafts and cylinders...