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Historical Blunders
in Navigation
GPSs are
becoming increasingly popular, and many people have them
in their cars now. Almost anyone who has used a GPS with
some degree of regularity has a story about it - it may
have found a new way home from work that saved 10
minutes, but so much more often people remember the
stories of getting lost on a back road in the middle of
nowhere, with the GPS insisting that the lake in front
of them was the best way home. Of course, people were
able to get lost long before the GPS existed. Here's a
brief history of getting lost, from ancient journeys at
sea to modern GPS-guided gaffes.
1492 AD: This quite famous example is well-known, but
nonetheless worth mentioning. Christopher Columbus
discovered the new world, but many people forget that he
actually made a huge mistake - he thought he had found
India. His theory was based on the (then) relatively
recent idea that the world was round, and the lack of
knowledge of the American continents. He believed that
sailing west would put him in India, and that it could
be used as a new, and much shorter, trade route. His
epic failure was, of course, one of the biggest
discoveries in history (OK, so technically he didn't
discover America, but everyone credits him for it.), but
it was still a major navigational failure.
1694: Ancient sea navigation was a big issue for many
ships. Especially in the age of exploration (a little
after this), maritime navigation was a major topic of
science which was important in order to make sea travel
safer and more reliable. Early developments like the
astrolabe enabled seagoers to track their location based
on stars and other heavenly bodies. The invention of the
compass was one of the most influential navigational
developments in history. In 1694, the HMS Sussex was
lost in a severe storm, resulting in it crashing and
sinking with over 10 tons of gold coins (an estimated
current value of $500 million US). This is just one of
many instances of ships getting lost at sea.
December 25, 2009: A Nevada couple got stranded on the
way back home from visiting family in Oregon, after
their GPS led them down a service road that wasn't
plowed. They were rescued after three days once they
were finally able to make cell phone contact. It's also
worth mentioning that this isn't nearly the only story
of its kind, a quick internet search for getting lost in
a snow storm with a GPS reveals several similar stories
over the past decade or so.
2010: Many French Catholics make a pilgrimage to the
town of Lourdes to see the third most-visited Catholic
shrine. However, many of them accidently forget the "s"
when they type the name into their GPS, resulting in
them ending in the village of Lourde, about 57 miles
away from their intended destination. Interestingly,
this seems not to be a one-time problem, but a constant
problem that villagers in Lourde deal with every day -
lost and confused tourists wondering where a whole city
went.
April 29, 2010: Military scientists on the bleeding edge
of technology seem like an unlikely subject for an
article like this, however super advanced space craft
apparently aren't immune from becoming just plain lost.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a US
military organization that develops and tests high tech
stuff, and notably invented the internet) was testing
out a brand new hypersonic space craft which traveled at
Mach 20 (20 times the speed of sound) in earth's outer
atmosphere, when they lost it. With a story setup like
that, you'd think there would be grandiose ending, but
unfortunately no one really knows what happened to it.
Ground control lost contact with the spacecraft 9
minutes into the flight, and they were never able to
recover it.
Even with increasingly accurate technology, major
navigational disasters still seem to be able to happen.
Technology is only as good as the people who make it,
and despite continuing improvements there'll always be
room for error, even on an epic scale.
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