Which way do I turn, now that I've learned to be strong

[austin_dern]

One of the silly little things I've wanted for my car is a dashboard compass. I don't have any need for them, but then neither does anyone else who doesn't drive their car into unexplored terrain, which is possible to do if you're in a Pathfinder commercial from the 1980s but not if you're in a Mercury Sable in suburban New Jersey. But I like compasses, partly because I like having a rough idea of the ordinal directions and partly because I remember watching with fascination the dashboard compass my grandparents had. There were other things nice about riding with them, even if it was a drive hours in the making to find an outlet mall or a flea market in Pennsylvania, but watching the compass was a little thing.

I'm not sure where I thought dashboard compasses came from, but my guess was the miscellaneous car trinkets aisle of a store like Target or Capital K Mart. Target didn't have them, so I got a peanut butter cup and a Diet Dr Pepper. K Mart didn't either. I might have tried an auto supply store, but the one nearest home I had already gone to for new battery leads, only to be told by my mechanics that they were the wrong size. I went back to exchange them and learned that as far as the auto parts folks could tell there was no such thing as wrong size battery leads, so I took a replacement set back, where they were not used by my mechanic. After a fiasco like that I don't dare show my face again.

Finally a couple small compasses appeared and I got one with a suction cup dome because I'm psychologically unable to make reasonably permanent alterations on things I own. It turns out my dashboard has this fine detailing which makes sure suction cups won't stick to it. It could fit quite well on the windshield, at the cost of obstructing my view of the road. It doesn't fit too bad in the cup holder tray, though. With that in place I could make all sorts of exciting discoveries about just how close to magnetic north runs the north-south highways, for example, or just how west I was driving when I was driving into the sun on the Interstate. It turned out things wouldn't be quite that simple.

Trivia: Australia and New Zealand did not accept the 1931 Statute of Westminster, granting autonomy to the British dominions, until the 1940s. Source: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson.

Currently Reading: The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity, Andro Linklater.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I had one o' those. It broke into two pieces, and of course upon throwing out one I found the other.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's an efficient way of dealing with the compass problem.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I had a dashboard compass in my Mercedes. Unfortunately, the main power cable for the car ran just in front of the dashboard, so on balance it made a better ammeter than compass.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

now we use the avian magnetic particles in our brainz tho, huh... 8>

heh! I had one also!!
It was reeeeeally nice, oil dampered and dial display... it lasted many many years, but alas the heat and cold over and over eventually let enough oil seep out that it stopped werkin'
I got some spares on sale and they are in storage though :9

[orv.livejournal.com]

Pilots refer to that type as a "whiskey compass," supposedly because early versions used an alcohol-based fluid. These days it's some magical concoction called "compass oil," which looks suspiciously like kerosene.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Spirits of wine were used for some maritime compasses of the 19th century, as part of the ongoing challenge to find something that would respond to changes in heading quickly and yet not be whirled around almost at random by ordinary shipboard movements. Actually, from considering the problems of making a working maritime compass it's amazing anyone ever got anywhere, ever.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Pilot training spends more time talking about the compass than any other instrument, mostly because it has so many error modes to take into account.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's got enough failure modes that when I listened to one book-on-tape describing the various problems -- after so many of them had already been pinned down -- that it starts to feel like it's just hopeless. When you get into soft-iron magnetic memory from changing orientation east-west north and then south of the equator it just looks really nice to go give up on it and go for gyrocompasses.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Airplanes have it particularly bad because they make banked turns. The Earth's magnetic field lines angle downward, what with having to dip into the surface somewhere in northern Canada, so they have a vertical component. Once the compass's axis is tilted out of the horizontal, it wants to follow that vertical component as well -- the north-seeking end of the compass wants to swing towards the ground. The upshot is the compass lags or leads your actual heading in turns, depending on whether you're flying in a northerly or southerly direction.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, with compass dip and movement in three dimensions ... and ... oh, let's just face it. Compasses are more trouble than they're worth. Just follow the Interstates.

[orv.livejournal.com]

My dad knew a pilot who joked that he used IFR navigation -- "I Follow Roads".

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And come to think of it, as the Andro Linklater book pointed out, getting the roads going north-south or east-west is not so easy as you might think either. Or perhaps you would since you've probably noticed how comically unlike ``following a line of latitude'' they managed to make the southern boundary of Michigan.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Yeah. For that matter, nearly all of lower Michigan is laid out in a grid of square mile sections. I've often driven these section roads (which run, ostensibly, north/south and east/west) and noted the places where they jog because of corrections to make the square sections match up with the non-square earth. I have a section map from an old atlas of Gratiot County, and there's a dotted line along one of these points marked 'FIRST CORRECTION LINE.'

Surveying is complicated, and it must have been even moreso before GPS.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of thing George Biddell Airy used to make his fortune, you know. Well, part of it. Correcting for ship's magnetism gave him a healthy side career as a compass consultant.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I can imagine. The compass I had included some adjustments for correcting for errors created by the car body, but after swinging it several times I never quite got it to work right on east/west headings. Also, bridges and overpasses here have a lot of rebar in them, so being anywhere near one would tend to produce wildly inaccurate readings.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This one was too simple to include any sorts of adjustments, which was all right as I wasn't looking for more than a way to tell when I'd got turned around by accident, really. It just didn't happen to work out that way.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

My car has one of those mirrors with the compass in it. At first I thought little of it and even turned it off (only to have it come back on each time I started the car again). Eventually I just left it on, and now I think I've become addicted to it, sort of in the same way I wouldn't want a car now that didn't have an outside temperature display either.

[orv.livejournal.com]

They're great for finding large iron ore deposits. ;) There's one spot near Marquette, Michigan where the one in my dad's truck goes absolutely bonkers.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I haven't had one of the compasses built into the rear-view mirror, at least not in a car I actually had control over. Temperature, though, I've seen and that's nice when the climate control is good enough that it's a way of keeping track of the weather that you're not in.

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