Historical

by Massimo Guarnieri

Once Upon a Time…The Compass

S
ome time ago, a short article the device was exploited for mili- mighty army of the Tang dynasty at
about the magnetic compass tary purposes on the mainland and the battle of Talas in present-day Kyr-
was placed on the Internet by in 1111–1117 for maritime navigation. gyzstan and, supported by local tribes,
“The Institute Alert” of the IEEE, which The military book Wǔ jıˉng Zǒngyào won an unexpected victory. Among the
brought to my mind that the story of (Collection of the Most Important Mili- enslaved Chinese were craftsmen, who
this small and simple device deserves tary Techniques) of 1044 [2] provided revealed to their new masters some of
our attention. instructions for the construction of an their best technological secrets, such
The need to orient ourselves in vast improved compass based on a magne- as silk and paper. The compass was not
spaces is as old as humankind, and it is tized iron needle floating on water or known to the Arabs, however, before
particularly difficult to do it where no hanging by a thread. 1232 [3], possibly after further trans-
reference points exist, not only on the Since the middle of the third century mission of Chinese knowledge. Hence,
seas but also on grasslands and des- CE or even earlier, the Chinese used a the compass was not conveyed to the
erts. The ancient Phoenician sailors second orientation device, the tchi-nan- West by the Arabs since its first men-
found their route across the open sea kin or south-pointing chariot. It was a tion in Europe is found in De Naturisre-
by observing the stars as early as one sophisticated mechanism similar to the rum (On the Nature of Things), written by
millennium BCE. Even earlier, the Lapi- differential gear of an automobile that the British scholar Alexander Neckam
ta culture exploited similar knowledge was capable of reacting to the differen- (1157–1217) in 1190 [4], who reported
when they sailed for hundreds of miles tial motion of the two wheels of the char- on a magnetized needle pointing north
across the Pacific Ocean to Tonga and iot, ensuring that its tiny statue-shaped that was already in use among sailors.
Samoa, and, many centuries later, so pointer always indicated south if it did This suggests that the magnetic com-
did Viking ships when they crossed the at the start of a journey, regardless of the pass could have been independently
Atlantic and landed in Newfoundland. turns taken along the way. invented in Europe, ­although later than
As far as we know, the idea of using In the eighth century CE, Islam in China.
some kind of artificial tool instead of spread over a large part of the known In 1269, the French scholar Petrus
the stars was first conceived in China. world, westward as far as the Atlantic Peregrinus of Maricourt wrote Epis-
During the Qin dynasty, around 206 shore of Northern Africa, northward tola Petri Peregrini de Maricourt ad
BCE, the Chinese knew that a lode- toward southern Europe, and eastward Sygerum de Foucaucourt, militem, de
stone suspended using a silk thread al- deep into central Asia. Here, in 751, the magnete (Letter of Peter Peregrinus of
ways turns to point to the poles. This Arab Abbasid knights clashed with the Maricourt to Sygerus of Foucaucourt,
was actually the first magnetic com- Soldier, on the Magnet) or simply Epis-
pass, albeit pointing south rather than tola de Magnete [5]. In the first part,
north, and was first used in geomancy Peregrinus gave a detailed description
and fortune telling. Around 70–80 CE, of the magnet’s properties: attraction
the Chinese text Lun-heng (Arguments of iron, presence of inseparable poles,
weighed) [1] reported a more sophis- repulsive and attractive interactions
ticated device, obtained by shaping a between like and unlike poles, and
loadstone into a spoon and placing it magnetization of iron by contact. In
in balance on a polished flat surface the second part, he provided a de-
(Figure 1). Centuries later, around scription of how a floating compass
1040–1044, during the Song dynasty, for astronomical observation as well
FIGURE 1 – An early Chinese magnetic as a dry compass for navigation could
compass made of a spoon-shaped loadstone
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIE.2014.2316044 on a flat surface, circa 70–80 CE. (Photo be built. His Epistola de Magnete was
Date of publication: 19 June 2014 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) one of the very first scientific works

60  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  ■  june 2014 1932-4529/14©2014IEEE

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 to be produced in Western Europe af- north, were also made in China and re-
ter the fall of the Roman Empire. Con- ported in the text Kuan Shih Ti Li Chih-
versely, there is no historical basis Meng (Mr. Kuan’s Geomantic Instructor)
for the attribution of the invention of of 880 CE [2]. In the Western world, the
the compass to Flavio Gioia of Amalfi first registration of magnetic declina-
(who was actually a fictitious charac- tion was made by Christopher Colum-
ter) around 1302. It is simply the out- bus in 1492, during his first voyage to
come of a sequence of reworking typical America. He did not reveal the mys-
of medieval chronicles. Nevertheless, it terious effect to his crew, who were
attests that the magnetic compass was already spooked by what they per-
already widely used by the beginning ceived as a reckless venture.
of the 14th century by the Italian mer- The magnetic dip, namely, the in-
chants who sailed the Mediterranean clination on the horizon of the Earth’s
to trade in Europe, North Africa, and magnetic field, was discovered by the
the Levant. It was initially only a mag- German humanist, technician, and
netized pointer floating in a bowl of instrument-maker Georg Hartmann FIGURE 2 – A perfected compass of the 16th
water, while later versions were pro- (1489–1564) in 1518. The British mari- century, enclosed in a protective boxwood box.
vided with bearings. Together with the ner Robert Norman described it in (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
sternpost rudder, also first invented 1581 in The Newe Attractive, a popular
in China, the compass allowed ships booklet on the use of the compass in electric effects, distinguishing them
to sail faster in the open seas, far navigation. By this time, the compass from magnetism. He introduced the
from shore, and also in bad weather. had been perfected. It was normally scientific Latin word electricus to de-
From the 14th century, the freighters made with a protective wooden box, scribe substances behaving like amber
of the maritime republics could sail typically made of boxwood, from m
(hmflxtqo —electron—in Greek), de-
from February to December, well be- which the French (boussole) and Ital- fined electric forces, and built an elec-
yond the traditional period of May to ian (bussola) names of the instrument troscope, i.e., a primitive instrument
September, and longer sailing sea- come (Figure 2). Around 1570, the for testing electrification. He was the
sons resulted in an increase of trade compass was provided with a gim- first to classify these actions as attrac-
and bigger gains. Venetian galleys bal, or Cardanic suspension, after the tive and repulsive. Gilbert’s book is ac-
could make two round trips a year Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano knowledged as the first modern treatise
to the Levant, and the lagoon city (Cardan, 1501–1576) who described it on magnetism and electricity. Gilbert
started blossoming into the wealthi- in his De Subtilitate of 1547 [6]. was also an innovative astronomer who
est in Europe. Continental shipping Petrus Peregrinus attributed the supported the heliocentric model intro-
movement increased gradually, and behavior of the compass needle to the duced by Copernicus more than half a
sea journeys from the Mediterranean attraction of celestial bodies, at a time century before and promoted by Gali-
to the North Sea became common when the stars and planets were sup- leo Galilei, with much wider resonance
thanks to these technological devel- posed to be transcendent entities of all over Europe, shortly afterwards. In
opments. The traditional portolan the heavens. More than three centuries 1601, Gilbert was appointed royal physi-
charts, which accurately mapped later, when the scientific revolution was cian to Queen Elizabeth I and for a short
ports and docks for coastal naviga- starting to spread across Europe, the period to James I of England. He died in
tion, advanced into sea charts suit- British physicist and physician William 1603 possibly from bubonic plague.
able for offshore routes by means of Gilbert (1544–1603) published the re- By the end of the 17th century, the
dead reckoning methods. Less fre- sults of 17 years of experimental studies British astronomer Edmund Halley
quent landings demanded ships with in the treatise De Magnete, Magneti- (1656–1742), now mainly renowned
a larger cargo capacity, and this re- cisque Corporibus et de Magno Magnete for his eponymous comet, carried out
sulted in the development of new wa- Tellure; Physiologia nova, plurimis et extensive observations of the mag-
tercrafts, the caravel and the carrack, argumentis et experimentis demonstrata netic declination in the Atlantic Ocean,
which had more sails and no oars and (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, which resulted in the General Chart of
were suitable for Atlantic navigation. and on that Great Magnet the Earth; New the Variation of the Compass, published
These eventually fostered the de- Knowledge Proved by Many Argumen- in 1701, in which the first isogonic lines
velopment of the European colonial tations and Experiments) of 1600 [7], (i.e., lines with equal declination) were
empires and the great oceanic explo- universally known as De Magnete. In presented (Figure 3). These data gave
rations of the 16th and 17th centuries. it, he addressed natural magnetic prop- the Royal Navy a considerable advan-
The very first observations of the erties, how artificial magnets can be tage for military and trade purposes.
magnetic declination, namely, the dif- made, and stated that the Earth is a gi- Thus, the magnetic compass, the
ference between geographic north, in- ant magnet, so affirming the unicity of first instrument exploiting an electro-
dicated by the pole star, and magnetic the two phenomena. He also described magnetic effect, was pivotal to trade

june 2014  ■  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  61

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 expansion and maritime exploration on
a planetary scale, contributing to the
great advancement of knowledge and
to the enrichment of several European
nations, albeit through the establish-
ment of colonial empires to the detri-
ment of indigenous civilizations.
Subsequently the compass played a
further important role in the develop-
ment of science. In the late 1810s, Hans
Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) was a
reputed Danish physicist, secretary of
the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
and Letters since 1815, and a member
of the Académie des Sciences de Paris.
He was a professor at the University of
Denmark, where he introduced experi-
mental research and isolated aluminum
in 1825. Before that, while preparing for
a conference in April 1820, he acciden-
tally discovered the effect named after
him, namely, that a compass needle
deflects in the proximity of an electric
current produced by a Volta battery
(Figure 4). The interaction between
electric currents and magnetism and
the magnetic effects of electricity were
thus identified. Indeed, Ørsted’s dis-
covery was preceded by that of the Ital-
ian jurist and physicist Gian Domenico
Romagnosi (1761–1835), who, in 1802,
reported the first observations of the
interaction between galvanic electricity
FIGURE 3 – A map of the Atlantic Ocean with isogonic lines (i.e., lines with equal declination) and magnetism in the Articulosul Gal-
from Edmund Halley’s General Chart of the Variation of the Compass, 1701. (Photo courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons.)
vanismo (Report on Galvanism), which
was published in a local newspaper but
largely overlooked by the scientific com-
munity [8]. This was not the case with
Ørsted, whose communication to the
Académie des Sciences de Paris in the
report Experimenta circa efficaciam
conflictus electrici in acum magneticum
(Experiments on the Effect of the impact
of electricity on a magnetic needle) of
July 1820 [9] immediately aroused the
interest of many scientists. Within a
couple of months, important develop-
ments were made in Germany, where
Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger
(1779–1857) built a multiturn electro-
magnet, and in France, where André-
Marie Ampère (1775–1836) proposed
the first mathematical theory of electro-
magnetism. The many advances of the
following years were astonishing and
FIGURE 4 – Hans Christian Ørsted’s experiment in 1820 revealing the interaction between the culminated in the discovery of magnetic
magnetic compass and the electric current. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) induction in 1830–1831 by the Italian

62  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  ■  june 2014

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 Francesco Zantedeschi (1797–1873), the continuous spinning was made pos- References
[1] D. Leslie and T’oung Pao, “Contribution to a
American Joseph Henry (1797–1878), sible by small electric motors, which new translation of the Lunheng,” BRILL, vol. 44,
and, most remarkably, Britain’s Michael were in turn a technological outcome no. 1/3, pp. 100–149, 1956.
[2] J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China,
Faraday (1791–1867) [10], who revealed of the discovery of magnetic induc- vol. 4, part 2. Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd., 1986.
how variable magnetism can produce tion. Yet only in 1906 was the German [3] P. G. Schmidl. (1996–1997). Two early Arabic
sources on the magnetic compass. J. Arabic Islam.
electric effects. The epistemological inventor Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe Stud. [Online]. 1, pp. 81–132. Available: http://
framework of slow-varying electromag- (1872–1931) able to build the first prac- www.lancaster.ac.uk/jais/volume/­volume1.htm
[4] A. Neckam, De naturisrerum: libri duo,
netism was completed, and the way was tical gyrocompass. It had two major T. Wright, Ed. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
paved for the fundamental theoretical advantages over magnetic compasses: 1863. [Online]. Available: https://archive.org/
details/alexandrineckamd00neck
achievements of James Clerk Maxwell it indicated true north and was unaf- [5] P. Peregrinus, Epistola Petri Peregrini de Maricourt
(1831–1879), starting with On Faraday’s fected by ferromagnetic materials, ad Sygerum de Foucaucourt, militem, de magnete,
1269 (Transl.: Arnold Brother), McGraw, 1904, re-
Lines of Force of 1856. such as the steel hull of ships. Thus, printed Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.
During the same period, the mag- it was widely used in the warships of [6] H. Cardanus, De Subtilitate Libri 21, J. M. For-
rester, Ed. Basilea: Sebastianum Henricpetri,
netic compass for navigation began World War I. 1547; Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Publications, 2013.
to be threatened by a new mechani- In recent years, new ways of using [7] W. Gilbert, De magnete, Magneticisque Corpori-
bus et de Magno Magnete Tellure; Physiologia
cal competitor. The first gyroscope magnetism to become oriented have nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis
for scientific use was made by the emerged. Magnetometers based on demonstrate, 1600 (Transl.: P. Fleury Motte-
lay). Dover Publications, 1958.
French physicist Jean Bernard Léon three magnetic probes, such as Hall ef- [8] D. Romagnosi, Articulo sul Galvanismo, Gazzet-
Foucault (1819–1868) in 1852, who also fect sensors, and processing chips con- ta di Trento, Trento, 1802.
[9] H.C. Ørsted, Experimenta circa efficaciam
named the device, while researching in stitute solid-state compasses, which conflictus electrici in acum magneticum,
the same line that led him to use the are embedded in the smartphones that Copenhagen 1821 (Transl.: Ole Immanuel
Franksen), in H. C. Ørsted—A Man of the two
eponymous pendulum, for which he millions of us use every day. And still cultures, Strandbergs Forlag, Birkerød, Den-
was awarded a Copley Medal by the the old, simple, and cheap magnetic- mark, 1981.
[10] M. Guarnieri, “Who invented the transformer?”
Royal Society. The gyrocompass was needle compass remains in use in a IEEE Ind. Electron. Mag., vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 56–59, 2013.
patented in 1885 by Marinus Gerardus large number of applications, e.g.,
van den Bos in The Netherlands after sport orienteering. 

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