Latitude and magnetic Earth

Author: Stephen Pumfrey
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-01
Features: William Gilbert (1544-1603) was the royal physician of Queen Elizabeth I of England, one of the most famous scientists of the time, hailed as the father of electricity, and the founder of modern magnetic science. Gilbert learned about the strange behavior of magnetized pointers—the "magnetic dip" phenomenon—from the elite navigators in London at the time. It was the golden age of global navigation and the golden age of discovering new colonies, and Gilbert was a man who used magnetism to determine the latitude of sea-going ships with the sky. Gilbert's works (he even proposed a solution to the longitude problem) challenged the orthodox science of the time and laid the foundation for the modern theory of Earth's magnetism. This book has a lively and easy-to-understand style, making it a new interpretation of Gilbert in forty years.