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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