相关论文: European Longitude Prizes. I. Longitude Determinat…
The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…
Although governments across Europe had realised the need to incentivise the development of practically viable longitude solutions as early as the late-sixteenth century, the English government was late to the party. An sense of urgency…
High-level Chinese cartographic developments predate European innovations by several centuries. Whereas European cartographic progress -- and in particular the search for a practical solution to the perennial "longitude problem" at sea --…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
Despite frequent references in modern reviews to a seventeenth-century Venetian longitude prize, only a single, circumstantial reference to the alleged prize is known from contemporary sources. Edward Harrison's scathing assessment of the…
The use of the observed positions of celestial bodies to determine the location of a navigator and to direct vessels, was an aspiration of ancient seafarers. Various peoples, in the Mediterranean as much as in the Indian Ocean, in China as…
In the 17th Century, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the scientific revolution. Much of the correspondence among contemporary scientists and their associates is now digitally available through the ePistolarium webtool,…
The mid-17th century saw unprecedented scientific progress. With the Middle Ages well and truly over, the Scientific Revolution had begun. However, scientific advancement does not always proceed along well-planned trajectories. Chance…
In 1492, for the first time, an unknown ocean opened up before sailors: weeks of navigation and no idea how to pinpoint their location. Since ancient times, navigators had known how to determine latitude by using the North Star, but the…
Jean Deshayes, a teacher of mathematics in his native France, single-handedly put Qu\'ebec on the map, literally. An accomplished astronomer, he used the lunar eclipse of 10--11 December 1685 to determine the settlement's longitude to…
The size of the diameter of the Sun has been debated for a very long time. First tackled by the Greek astronomers from a geometric point of view, an estimate, although incorrect, has been determined, not truly called into question for…
The students are introduced to navigation in general and the longitude problem in particular. A few videos provide insight into scientific and historical facts related to the issue. Then, the students learn in two steps how longitude can be…
Macroeconomic data on the Spanish economy during the Second Republic is not accurate, the interpretation of historical events from the figures obtained is divergent and misleading. Hasty laws were enacted in attempts to resolve social…
The Scientific Revolution sweeping through seventeenth-century Europe led to unprecedented intellectual and scientific insights and high-profile technological developments. Combined with a significant worldwide increase in naval commerce,…
During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…
By the twelfth century, northern European scholars gradually embraced Arabic innovations in science and technology. England naturally developed into a significant centre of the new learning in western Europe. Hereford, and specifically its…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
Spain was a scientifically backward country in the early 19th-century. The causes were various political events, the War of Independence, and the reign of Fernando VII. The introduction of contemporary physics into textbooks was therefore a…
Climate change is a non-uniform phenomenon. This paper proposes a new quantitative methodology to characterize, measure, and test the existence of climate change heterogeneity. It consists of three steps. First, we introduce a new testable…
We examine connections between the mathematics behind methods of drawing geographical maps due, on the one hand to Marinos and Ptolemy (1st-2nd c. CE) and on the other hand to Delisle and Euler (18th century). A recent work by the first two…