ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Back to the Future of Wayfinding: Pre-modern Astro-navigation in the GPS Age

• In Event: Celestial Spheres

English Abstract

New technologies in the 20th century challenged the need for navigators to look to the stars. The rapid development of radio direction-finding, beam and hyperbolic systems, and finally satellite navigation, promised to make old methods redundant. An unfathomable global system of transmitters and receivers would replace skills in taking sightings and computing with brass and paper tools; the signals from atomic clocks would eclipse the long-fixed shapes of the constellations.

Yet from the beginning this march of new technology was contested. In the first place, while black-box systems promised to make knowledge of location and direction universally accessible, the cost of equipment raised new barriers. As prices plummeted and precision soared, concerns grew that sailors and pilots might lack the understanding necessary to interpret navigational data, leading to increased risk. It has even been suggested that reliance on technology rewires our brains, making us stupider.

Meanwhile, as ‘traditional’ techniques became outmoded, interest surged in reconstructing the seemingly miraculous methods of the past. Respect for the astrolabe-toting heroes of the European ‘Age of Exploration’ was complicated by a growing pluralistic awareness that their achievements had been preceded by a suite of skills and senses practised in the Pacific. In the Anthropocene, an instinctive feel for one’s environment seems ever more precious when alone atop a vast ocean.

Most recently, fears about the vulnerability of GPS systems to jamming or even spoofing have become stronger – and more realistic. Put together, these pressures have caused hydrographic offices and training schools to pull back from abandoning old materials and methods. This paper will survey the arguments of manufacturers and mapmakers, technologists and traditionalists – from the backstaff to the blue dot – to show why, in the age of Google, navigation is so contested.

Author

• Seb Falk, University of Cambridge