Author Description

"If you want to know where you are, you need a good clock. This surprising connection between time and place has been true for centuries and is now being explored in Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, the companion book to the National Air and Space Museum exhibition of the same name. This beautifully illustrated book covers five major periods of navigation history. The first period, when explorers were navigating at sea, spans from Vikings and Polynesians who found their way without clocks, to the eighteenth-century development of the marine chronometer. Explorers then turned their sights to the skies; the need to navigate in the air led to the development of bubble sextants like the type used by Charles Lindbergh as well as the radar technology used during World War II. The mid-century space race required new technology for navigating in space, including the atomic clock. The final two periods of navigation history cover the invention of satellite navigation and its ubiquity in day-to-day modern life on GPS devices, smartphones, and other personal electronics. Complete with sidebars about pioneering navigators as well as missteps in technology that led to later navigation advances, Time and Navigation is a comprehensive exploration of the history of navigation technology and its social implications. It helps us understand where we have been and how we got there so that we can understand where we are going"--Provided by publisher.