Those two metal spheres are not decoration, they are Kelvin’s balls, part of a precise system that counteracts magnetic errors caused by steel hulls. This explains how permanent and induced magnetism ...

Modern steel ships warp a magnetic compass with both permanent and induced magnetism, and the binnacle is packed with clever countermeasures to cancel it out. This breaks down hard iron vs soft iron ...

THE subject of this lecture is the gyrostatic compass, often called the gyro-compass. An engineer of my acquaintance was asked if he under-stood what a gyro-compass was, and he replied, “Of course I ...

Capt. John William Hart, who had calibrated ships’ magnetic compasses for more than four decades and was the former owner of Maryland Nautical Sales Inc., died Monday from complications of a broken ...