Anybody used a sun compass?

[Laurentius]

Ha! Sent me off down another rabbit hole about slide rules. My class must have been one of the last that had to buy and be taught how to use a slide rule. I still have it but have forgotten how to use it.

We also used Comptrollers - a desk-based mechanical add/subtract machine, based I think on the Cruk drum calculator Seagull refers to. Looked like a cross between shop till and a typewriter. Like typing pools, big firms had comptroller pools of girls (no boys allowed).
It seems when I was still at school history was being made, and there was a step change in methods of caclulating. Use of slide rules and Compt's went in the bin, with the invention of the Hewlett Packard scientific calculator and the Texas Instruments cheaper version. By the last year in school we all had bought cheap texas instruments pocket calculators.

Did a college course around 1980, stock control and double entry book keeping, this would have been on the very cusp of change I think, we learned how to use various accounting machines and commercial filing systems, but star of the show was a commodore pet. Shortly after that typewriters started to disappear and it was all wordstar on DOS, Lotus 123 and Dbase, all on dos loaded up from floppy discs which actually were floppy. Pity the poor sods who signed up to a course in typewriter maintenance.

 

[Pattree]

I clung on to my guessing pole aka slide rule and refused to have a computer in my desk For a long time. I knew what would happen: I would end up typing my own documents, handouts and letters and the typing pool would disappear.

I picked up a bit of the jargon and when nearly everyone challenged me I told them that I had a VAL interface. Val was the only audio typist and I commandeered the only dictaphone.

Ref Sun compass - why? Vastly too complicated to mess with. Presumably, in the absence of GPS you’d need a sextant to establish your latitude and a chronometer to calibrate your sextant.

Cut out the middle gubbins and use the hour hand of the chronometer to point at the sun; always provided that you’ve got any.

 

[Seagull]

On the other hand, one could just apply current longitude ,(in time), to the daily equation of time..and then you would have an absolute time of Transit of the Meridian. This would be either due North or due South, depending on hemisphere...and your hour hand is calibrated.

But, on yet another 'other hand', perhaps not.

regards
Ceeg