Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/228

216 invented a compass with much smaller needles than those previously used, which allows Sir George Airy's principles to he applied completely. With this compass correctors can be arranged so that the needle shall point accurately in all directions, and these correctors can be adjusted at sea from time to time, so as to eliminate any error which may arise through change in the ship's magnetism, or in the magnetism induced by the earth through change of the ship's position. By giving the compass-card a long period of free oscillation, great steadiness is obtained when the ship is rolling.

Sir William Thomson has also enriched the art of navigation by the invention of two sounding-machines; the one being devised for ascertaining great depths very accurately in less than one quarter the time formerly necessary, and the other for taking depths up to 130 fathoms without stopping the ship in its onward course. In both these instruments steel piano-forte wire is used instead of the hempen and silken lines formerly employed; in the latter machine the record of depth is obtained not by the quantity of wire run over its counter and brake wheel, but through the indications produced upon a simple pressure gauge consisting of an inverted glass tube, whose internal surface is covered beforehand with a preparation of chromate of silver, rendered colorless by the sea-water up to the height to which it penetrates. The value of this instrument for guiding the navigator within what he calls "soundings" can hardly be exaggerated; with the sounding-machine and a good chart he can generally make out his position correctly by a succession of three or four casts in a given direction at given intervals, and thus in foggy weather is made independent of astronomical observations, and of the sight of light-houses or the shore. By the proper use of this apparatus, such accidents as happened to the mail-steamer Mosel not a fortnight ago would not be possible. As regards the value of the deep-sea instrument I can speak from personal experience, as on one occasion it enabled those in charge of the cable steamship Faraday to find the end of an Atlantic cable, which had parted in a gale of wind, with no other indication of the locality than a single sounding, giving a depth of 950 fathoms. To recover the cable a number of soundings in the supposed neighborhood of the broken end were taken, the 950 fathom contour line was then traced upon a chart, and the vessel thereupon trailed its grapnel two miles to the eastward of this line, when it soon engaged the cable twenty miles away from the point, where dead reckoning had placed the ruptured end.

Whether or not it will ever be practicable to determine oceanic depths without a sounding-line, by means of an instrument based upon gravimetric differences, remains to be seen. Hitherto the indications obtained by such an instrument have been encouraging, but its delicacy has been such as to unfit it for ordinary use on board a ship when rolling.