What makes nautical miles even more useful is when you're on the water and using a navigation chart, the vertical edges of the chart have the minutes of latitude. You use a 2-arm compass (not a magnetic compass) and spread the arms until one point is one your location and the other is on the destination. You then simply place the points on the vertical edge of the chart and count the minutes of latitude and that's your distance in nautical miles.
I have been sailing boats since I was a child. I still remember when I first understood how nautical miles work, and how useful it is as a unit of measure. I learned to navigate on paper charts, and I still prefer to do so, rather than using a GPS plotter. It gives me a kind of situational awareness that I can't get from a little led display. The relationship between distance, time and speed is easy to calculate, and super well adapted for a sailing vessels that move in the ranges of 0-10 knots
I actually love this video. Your understanding of sophisticated storytelling, simple visuals and effortless editing literally made me say out loud, "I love this video," to myself. I hope reading that makes you smile mate.
I like this as a former U.S. navy quartermaster (navigation for you land types), but also as a native Hawaiian, to show that while the Europeans were skirting the land, the Polynesians were masters of the pacific making it look like a puddle more than the largest expanse of the time.
That's not what a quartermaster does. I've seen plenty of movies and I know that the quartermaster is someone who is friends with all of the main characters and sometimes his job is to argue with the captain. Thank you for your service, friend.
I like the playfulness of this conversation; so the quartermaster gets to control the goods and the Bond, whilst navigating the ship!@@aaronarmstrong9776
I’m the quartermaster for my son’s baseball little league. It’s my job to make sure none of the uniforms fit properly. I’ve been told this is broadly in line with Navy standard operations.
Great YT content! Enjoyed it, and learned something. Production values were top notch. Mentioning Monaco as a meeting place for science, and putting up a panel with race cars is pure gold.
Nautical miles, and their related speed measurement knots - nautical miles per hour - are so deeply entrenched in worldwide marine and aviation use, they easily survived the conversion to the metric system.
The nautical mile is pure beauty and its realization was one of the most important discoveries in history. Relating distance to time I can only imagine it was the first step in a long line of discoveries that led eventually to special relativity
Queen Isabella was a ruling queen in her homeland, Castille. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragorn was political uniting the two largest kingdoms within "Spain", and the marriage document specified they would be joint rulers of their joined lands. But the diplomats, courtiers, and anyone else in court treated her as just a figurehead, just another queen for children. This drove her nuts. Part of the reason she funded Columbus was, if he succeeded, her status would rise astronomically. Fascinating woman. The stories that she sold her royal jewels to finance Columbus, is only a metaphor
She didn’t sell her jewels, she more or less wagered her crown. Or… she decided o keep the expense off the books in case of failure, so that she wouldn’t get hammered as foolish.
Regarding 9:17, one nautical mile is one minute of arc length along a great circle around the earth. Since there are 360 degrees around the circumference of a sphere, 360 degrees is equivalent to 21,600 minutes of arc length which means 21,600 nautical miles. Regarding 10:13, the original definition of one meter was one ten-millionth of the arc length from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian. Therefore the circumference of the earth would be 40,000 kilometers. The length of one meter was inscribed between two marks onto a bar made of 90% platinum +10% iridium alloy and stored in Sèvres, France.
Subscribed! Did not know I was interested in this, but you've done such a great job of presenting this information that I stayed and watched the whole thing!
I remember studying navigation to acquire my charter licence. There was no gps in the 70s and I had to learn dead reckoning which involves a good compass and knowing one's speed. I also learned how to use a sextant which I used often just to practice. It isn't that hard actually. 1.15 mph= knot or nautical mile.
Willy Snellius got the measurment a little small,, because he was measurin near the 45th parallel,, which IS a little small as compared to the Equator. I saw his calculations printed out years ago. He did his calculations perfectly,, and then threw in a fudge factor, a guess, based upon this fore shortening when approaching the poles. His guess was also based upon a perfect sphere. Of course, it ain't. It was a good guess. I particularly loved, was impressed,, by this long winded perfect math calculation... and then he threw in a 'guess'. Thus is written good science.
A nautical mile is 1/60°. aka: an arcminute. As navigation is in degrees by astro observation, (astrolabe and sextant), and degrees of latitude longitude and great circles are cited in sexagesimal divisions of degrees, the arcminute was about the smallest angle that could be typically measured. And the arcminute - an angle - was essentially renamed nautical mile. Knowing that the length in distance of arcminutes varies is a minor concern in navigation. So Brits had the most maps and the Admiralty nautical mile was rounded off to 6080 ft, close enough. And the fact that 1 nautical mile is somewhat close to a statute mile made distances easy to comprehend. Especially when making 3-4 knots in a ship. And in calculation nautical miles times 60 equals degrees. And calculation is by trig function so no need for feet meters or statute miles.
Sad I never learned this in school 50 years ago and I ended up learning this by watching TV. Thanks for finally enlightening me. Thumbs up and subscribed!
@brucelyon6398 It is never too late to learn. In school (& college) the studies, is rushed through. It never gives an opportunity to "learn" or savour what one learns. All that comes later. But yes, as a student one must learn where to look for, if one wants to learn a new thing. This generation is lucky in that (but true facts should be "presented", not some tales which are far from true & that demands discretion).
It's fun to think about the history of scientific thought; how a thought started, how it evolved, etc. So, they got the latitude (space) part right, then along came the addition of time, allowing for longitude. Such a great way to visualize Special Relativity and the concept of Space-Time. (General Relativity includes gravity)
Space time and GRAVITY, can you explain how the moon circle the earth when the earth travels 66600mpu?You can start with full moon when the sun,earth and moon are in line? Go in detail like your comment.
Fun fact: The meter isn't actually 1/1000,000 of a quarter-meridian through Paris due to one of the surveyers making a mistake. To his credit, he realized it relatively soon after returning. Unfortunately by that point the Napoleonic wars had started and there wasn't really the bandwidth to re-do it, so they just went with the mistake. Later metrology conventions discussed revising the meter to actually be based on the meridian, but by that point there were too many prototype meters floating around for that to be practical. It was thus defined based on lines on a stick for many years, until Special Relativity and increasingly accurate measurement methods allowed a definition in terms of the second (defined based on the inverse frequency of the hyperfine transition of cesium) and the speed of light.
There has always been a bit of "needle" between the Brits and the French about measurements. They hated Greenwich Mean Time being used the standard for navigation. As for the English language being the required language for the world airlines- - -
Fascinating! But you kinda missed "what is a knot"? The deal with a nautical mile being a geodesic with an arc that spans one minute of angle ( 1/60 of a degree). But what good is that? Well if you are on a ship and take a piece of a log or stick and throw it overboard with a string attached and a knot in the strong every 47 feet, then count how many knots pass out in 28 seconds the result is nautical miles per hour, or knots. You then pulled the log back in and entered the value in the ship's notebook along with the weather and any interesting items. This is the 'log' entry and the notebook came to be known as the ship's log. You need a clock or egg-timer type little hourglass or something for the time. And the speed is speed through the water and does not account for currents, etc. Like air speed versus ground speed. And thus a nautical mile is one minute of arc on the Earth's surface. And a knot is one nautical mile per hour. The funny thing is naut and knot are not related etymologically. Ship speed is deceiving because it travels day and night. A ship that only goes 6 miles per hours still travels 144 miles per day.
Fascinating. Well written. The egg timer can be any convenient number of seconds, and the knots can be at any manageable distance apart ... PROVIDED they are calibrated to each other. The secret is that they are both the same fraction of their respective units. A three-minute egg-timer is 1/20th of an hour, so the log line gets knots 1/20th of a mile apart. It's probably easiest to buy a sandglass, check it for time, and then have someone tie knots in a rope to match it.
In geolocation tracking, coarse geolocation is accurate to a nautical mile (a minute of latitude) and fine geolocation is accurate to 1/60 of a nautical mile (a second of latitude).
@johnb6723 While learning "surveying" in college, we used a chain of 100 links & were told it is 101⅓ feet (30.8 meters) long. It is the length of 1 "arc second". When I find location of paces written in 0.01 Arc Second as extreme accurate, that translates to 1 foot (30 cm), it really makes me laugh. Do we put a "pin" on that spot? Is this accuracy necessary?
Very interesting and informative. Would be very helpful to make captions available. Also, unless I missed it, you never say how many miles is a nautical miles, 1.15.
Hey alittle bit of a correction or I suppose re-correction. At 4:35 you indeed said correctly the first time that the higher the Sun is at noon, the closer you are to the equator. However, the picture in question shows us position calculated by the angle of POLARIS over the horizon, also known as the North Star. Calculating your latitude from the Polaris would infact be the reverse compared to calculating the latitude from the Sun's position due to the fact that Polaris is almost perfectly aligned with Earth's Northern axis of rotation. As in, when the Polaris is closer to the horizon, the closer you are to the equator. Ofcourse you couldn't use this technique on the southern hemisphere of the Earth, as the Earth itself would block the star. This is why on the southern hemisphere, part from measuring your latitude in relation to the sun, you'd use the Southern Cross constallation, which is a little less convinient way of measuring the latitude, and needs more calculating whn the constallation isn't at it's highest point on the sky. Other than that little hitch, what an excellent video! :)
@Zkarimus Yes, you're right. "The higher the Sun is at noon, the closer you are to the equator" is a misstatement. It could be so on September 23 or March 21, only. On June 21 that means, you're on the tropic of Cancer, not the Equator.
For your next WTF is a [unit of measure] episode, I suggest the new (as of 2019) kilogram (which has a mass within a couple ppb of the previous kilogram). It's interesting how much cutting-edge science and technology makes an appearance in realizing the kilogram now. "Wait, it's quantum mechanics?" Yes, yes it is!
One minute of arc of latitude at the equator, or 6080.3 ft, depending on which spheroid you use. (2Pi x R)(Delta/360)To get knots, multiply miles by 1.1.
I once worked at a subway and a got prank called. I went along with it. They asked how long was our footlongs... i responded in inches, feet, millimeters, lightyears, and nuatical miles. 😂
@Bach_Treebane There are plenty of empty brains, idling for want of work, in this world ! This is the height of inventiveness. Do you what is "height of unemployment"? (I wouldn't tell that, there are ladies around)
10:34 They don't seem to have read the whole thing: the cable lentgh is supposed to be 1/10th of a nautical mile, i.e. 185.2 metres. But in the Royal Navy it's 608 feet, or 185.3 metres, and in the US Navy, 120 fathoms, or 219.5 metres.
People think that medieval working class food was bland -- and it was, to our palate. But local spices were available. Garlic was considered vulgar by the upper class at one point because it is so common. To them it was fine because palates are relative. Spices were just yet another way for rich people to show off.
@CrizzyEyes When the Ottoman Imperial duty, levied on Black pepper from Kochin & Calicut ports in India made black pepper cost its weight in gold, it made Chris Columbus sit up & think. His thinking (& knowledge of a Spherical Earth, differing from the then contemporary thinking, that Earth is a flat sheet; even now many Europeans swear by "Flat Earth") led to his effort to undertake the first European voyage across the breadth of Atlantic Ocean to "discovery of a Western sea-route to India" & discovery of Americas (instead), making all native Americans "Indians"! There can be no worse confusion than this for ostensibly knowledgeable people.
Can someone please tell me whats the name of the song with the guitars and violins?!?!? Near the beginning, its so familiar yet I have no idea where I've heard it!!!
And the 1/60 of a degree is why knots are measured in time. There are 60 minutes in a degree and 60 second in a minte and we measure the length of travel by measuring the time and speed using a log line that was a rope with knots tied in it at certain intervals. It was dropped with a wood end for drag and as it was released behind the ship the number of knots on the line that fed out where counted over a specific time which gaveyour speed in knots. And with the knot speed known you could use that speed with the time and know your distance traveled and thats why a latitude line was one degree, and that degree is 60 minutes and broke down to a smaller measurement of 60 seconds. The reason it was broken down from the 360 to the 1/60th is because of 60 minutes in an hour and the earth rotating at 24hours. So lat and long is measured in degrees minutes and seconds. So if you go north at 15 knots you will go one degree in 4 hours. And if you go 15 knots in say 1 hour and 15 seconds you can narrow that down to a specific point. Measurement on a nautical chart is only made using latitude lined because the degrees stay at a constant where longitude line degrees get smaller from the equator the further north or south you go.
Columbus initially went west after convincing the Spanish monarchs it was an alternate route to India and China (for those spices), so they bankrolled his expedition. Not because he was discovering new lands for them. And that's why it's still called the 'West Indies'.
@NmpK24 But I think China was never in that picture (you must have added that, on a hunch). Till about 1100 AD, Europeans weren't even aware of China, though caravans ferried across Central Eurasia, goods & rats that infested Europe triggering "Great Plague". Alexander (the Great)'s world ended with India. His teacher, tutor & mentor, Aristotle was with him, to guide him.
@MrPoornakumar The Romans sent dignitaries to China. Europe knew, but it was a limited knowledge that was then further limited by the fall of Rome and the loss of half the Empire's accumulated knowledge give or take, with the other half in Constantinople.
The Roman mile was way shorter than the modern mile. In fact, even in Rome it was 1000 soldier's paces long only in theory. The "pace" was defined by them as 5ft which seems to be a lot longer than a real pace of an average soldier, and the 5ft pace was (if ever) probably only attainable over shorter very fast marches. I guess there had to be good propaganda value in presenting your army as having extraordinary abilities, but 1000 paces on an all-day long march was likely to be closer to a kilometer than the 1.4km of the officially defined mile. But, because the definition was based in a variable human action, it was easy for a commander to claim they had marched 100 miles because he was measuring the number of paces, but the actual distance traveled could have been much less. In the Middle Ages various kings played the game of my mile is bigger than yours and so it grew to the current 1.6km length, and the Roman practice of dividing into 1000 yards became 1760 yards for no logical reason. We can blame Medieval Christians for the current illogical mile definition rather than the Romans.
@artistjoh 1. If "only attainable (or attained) over shorter very fast marches", all of them Roman soldiers would have to undergo surgery for "Hydrocele" and unfit for military service, later. 2. You seem to suggest that Medieval Christians are stupider than Roman troops.
“You can do this at home, if you want to. Just climb to the top of a tall building and calculate the circumference of the earth.” Sure! Hold your breath, I’ll be right back!☝️
I've read the Apollo missions used three different measurement systems. Imperial for launch operations, Nautical for the trip to the moon and orbital operations, and metric for the lunar surface.
No one in the US has ever used the Imperial system. It was created by an act of Parliament in 1820s… British Parliament. 1820s… get it? Decades after the US gained independence. The Imperial System is foreign to the US and is not compatible. What you mean to say is US Customary.
The US is still deeply attached to: Pounds, ounces Gallons, pints, quarts, ounces Feet, inches, fraction inches, yard Acres Miles, MPH Fahrenheit Inches Hg, PSI Are these imperial units? Liter is getting used more because beverage companies not law.
@@larryscott3982 There are slight differences between certain units in the Imperial system and the Customary system, though. Primarily when it comes to volume.
Yes, that came about because when the British reformed the volume units around the year 1800, the US was still angry at Britain (1776 anyone?) and never adopted the changes. The reformed units are the "imperial" units (eg: the imperial gallon is 4.54 liters, while the "US" gallon is 3.78 liters).
My man, you left some stuff out. 1. A nautical mile is about 2000 yards or 6000 feet. 2. A "Knot" is a measurement of speed, was based on the 2000 yard/6000ft nautical mile. 3. How a "knot" came to be a measurement of speed. 4. Understanding dead reckoning (Time/Speed/Distance).
4:32 great video but in this section you keep saying you can measure the sun, but didn't they use other stars in the night sky? for example, the graphic you're pointing to says polaris, not the sun.
That they did. They used observations both of local noon and of the moons of Jupiter to set their chronometers to find accurate longitudes. They needed a set of two clocks for the job: one kept on Greenwich time, and the other reset for observed local noon, using a sextant to find the exact moment the sun was highest right there. This led to the curious naval, and navigational, habit of figuring each calendar day noon-to-noon rather than the landlubber midnight to midnight. With sextant and clock, they knew for sure what bloody time it was.
Great detail. Excellent job. But as usual, it leads to more questions. As in how a nautical mile relates to a knot (as in doing 5 knots). And did the distance of a knot differ in the old days to what it does now and how does iit match up to a nautical mile these days or are they completely separate?
They’re called knots because sailors used a rope with knots tied in it, and attached to a small plank. The distance between knots was a careful specification as was the shape and size of the wood plank attached. It was thrown overboard and the knots that were dragged out were counted for 28 seconds by a sand glass. And that was developed to approximate the distance per hour at 6080 ft per nautical mile. And more unit confusion: the distance between knots in the rope was 8 fathoms.
@@larryscott3982 That is basically what I was trying to clarify. Since the space between the knots on the rope is a distance that was guesstimated to relate to the distance of a nautical mile (or is that an error?) and now we have a different number for the length of a nautical mile to when "knots" was invented, what does that do to the meaning of knots of speed? I.e. if one were to travel for 1 hour at 100 knots, how much distance was actually covered? 100 nautical miles or just something close to it? Or am I just confusing the notion of knots reflecting nautical miles covered per unit time? Maybe I should stick to measuring my velocity in kph and distance traveled in miles or visa- ersa.
Great upload, thanks. Very much related: I recommend the book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. It's a great, brief, fascinating history tale primarily about the tricky issue of determining latitude at sea
No, it's about the difficulty of finding your longitude at sea. Latitude is how far north or south you've gone, longitude is how far west or east you've gone.
There's a video by a couple Englishman called, map men longitude, it explains in a concise easy to understand way not a shill just trying to be helpful I'ma a Kentucky hillbilly and I understand it lol. This video here is really to glad I found it
So, how far is it from the north pole to Pittsburgh Pa. I need to know because I'm thinking of applying for work at Santa's workshop, and I might have to commute.
You mentioned that it wasn't until 1970 that the British got the memo about the standardised nautical mile, but when will the Americans get the memo about metric, something the British got many years ago?
Speaking to the 1000 paces, our "English" mile would be a pace of about 5 feet 4 inches, quite a long stride unless the Romans meant each placement of the right or left foot; what we would consider 2 paces...
I didn't know this French developed measurement replaced the one sixtieth of a degree standard. A Nautical mile is 6078 feet or one minute of arc of the Earth's circumference . A Statute mile is 5280.
I'm guessing but one reason why the Brits were late taking up the French definition was that the Royal Navy had mapped and produced some of the best maps and they had worked very well.
What makes nautical miles even more useful is when you're on the water and using a navigation chart, the vertical edges of the chart have the minutes of latitude. You use a 2-arm compass (not a magnetic compass) and spread the arms until one point is one your location and the other is on the destination. You then simply place the points on the vertical edge of the chart and count the minutes of latitude and that's your distance in nautical miles.
Seems it would to difficult to be accurate with the constant rocking of the ship. Still fascinating technology for its time.
lol used at sea hey, wow, who would have thought. "nautical
" anything had anything to do with the sea
I have been sailing boats since I was a child. I still remember when I first understood how nautical miles work, and how useful it is as a unit of measure. I learned to navigate on paper charts, and I still prefer to do so, rather than using a GPS plotter. It gives me a kind of situational awareness that I can't get from a little led display.
The relationship between distance, time and speed is easy to calculate, and super well adapted for a sailing vessels that move in the ranges of 0-10 knots
What determines a knot?
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist1 sure, after you, you first, age before beauty, will follow you closely, right behind you...
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist1 But will he tell us the distance in feet of a nautical mile?
Former Navigator/Bombardier on the B-52, can confirm that all you say is true, and applies to the aeronautical as well.
@@LauraKnotek
1 knot = 1nautical miłe per hour, it is an unit for velocity. 1.852 km/h.
I actually love this video. Your understanding of sophisticated storytelling, simple visuals and effortless editing literally made me say out loud, "I love this video," to myself. I hope reading that makes you smile mate.
I won't call it "effortless"
@repentand..........
Sure I will. What is his email address?
@@gaetanoroccuzzo
That's a good one !
The thumbnail going straight into the video was absolutely magical!
This is awesome. The narration/presentation style is rad and the content is super interesting.
“rad”? Are you posting comments from the 1980s😂 Just kidding. I agree with your enthusiastic opinion.
Bro this channel is going to grow! The concept, the topics, the little brother on the background😂 well done guys
And the narration
I like this as a former U.S. navy quartermaster (navigation for you land types), but also as a native Hawaiian, to show that while the Europeans were skirting the land, the Polynesians were masters of the pacific making it look like a puddle more than the largest expanse of the time.
So you were a storeman.
That's not what a quartermaster does. I've seen plenty of movies and I know that the quartermaster is someone who is friends with all of the main characters and sometimes his job is to argue with the captain.
Thank you for your service, friend.
I like the playfulness of this conversation; so the quartermaster gets to control the goods and the Bond, whilst navigating the ship!@@aaronarmstrong9776
Quartermaster, is that the guy who sits and shouts out the numbers he reads off of the garmin?
I’m the quartermaster for my son’s baseball little league. It’s my job to make sure none of the uniforms fit properly. I’ve been told this is broadly in line with Navy standard operations.
Wonderfully presented information! I always wondered what the difference was between the two measurements. Now I know, thanks!
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist1certainly pal, as you say mush, indeed my fellow,
GREAT work!! GREAT work!! Now I know what a Nautical Mile is, and why it is important, and all the rest of it!!! GREAT work!!
Great YT content! Enjoyed it, and learned something. Production values were top notch.
Mentioning Monaco as a meeting place for science, and putting up a panel with race cars is pure gold.
OOHHHHHHH THE THUMBNAIL TRANSITION IS SO CLEAN HOLYYYYYY
Nautical miles, and their related speed measurement knots - nautical miles per hour - are so deeply entrenched in worldwide marine and aviation use, they easily survived the conversion to the metric system.
Aviation also uses feet so they dont use the metric system except in China / Russia.
Love the Ben Prunty soundtrack in the beginning, and the "second brother" tangent made me laugh. Take my subscription!
The nautical mile is pure beauty and its realization was one of the most important discoveries in history. Relating distance to time I can only imagine it was the first step in a long line of discoveries that led eventually to special relativity
Queen Isabella was a ruling queen in her homeland, Castille. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragorn was political uniting the two largest kingdoms within "Spain", and the marriage document specified they would be joint rulers of their joined lands. But the diplomats, courtiers, and anyone else in court treated her as just a figurehead, just another queen for children.
This drove her nuts.
Part of the reason she funded Columbus was, if he succeeded, her status would rise astronomically. Fascinating woman. The stories that she sold her royal jewels to finance Columbus, is only a metaphor
She didn’t sell her jewels, she more or less wagered her crown.
Or… she decided o keep the expense off the books in case of failure, so that she wouldn’t get hammered as foolish.
A good video AND the FTL Faster than Light soundtrack? le chef kiss
Regarding 9:17, one nautical mile is one minute of arc length along a great circle around the earth. Since there are 360 degrees around the circumference of a sphere, 360 degrees is equivalent to 21,600 minutes of arc length which means 21,600 nautical miles. Regarding 10:13, the original definition of one meter was one ten-millionth of the arc length from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian. Therefore the circumference of the earth would be 40,000 kilometers. The length of one meter was inscribed between two marks onto a bar made of 90% platinum +10% iridium alloy and stored in Sèvres, France.
Subscribed! Did not know I was interested in this, but you've done such a great job of presenting this information that I stayed and watched the whole thing!
Fantastic video, subscribed.
Great learning experience and hilarious, Good shit.
I love all these origin of words. Love your crude explanation
I remember studying navigation to acquire my charter licence. There was no gps in the 70s and I had to learn dead reckoning which involves a good compass and knowing one's speed. I also learned how to use a sextant which I used often just to practice. It isn't that hard actually. 1.15 mph= knot or nautical mile.
I love the way the thumbnail transitioned seamlessly into an animation. Not sure I've seen that before.
Earned my sub. Great presentation.
Willy Snellius got the measurment a little small,, because he was measurin near the 45th parallel,, which IS a little small as compared to the Equator. I saw his calculations printed out years ago. He did his calculations perfectly,, and then threw in a fudge factor, a guess, based upon this fore shortening when approaching the poles. His guess was also based upon a perfect sphere. Of course, it ain't. It was a good guess. I particularly loved, was impressed,, by this long winded perfect math calculation... and then he threw in a 'guess'. Thus is written good science.
A nautical mile is 1/60°. aka: an arcminute. As navigation is in degrees by astro observation, (astrolabe and sextant), and degrees of latitude longitude and great circles are cited in sexagesimal divisions of degrees, the arcminute was about the smallest angle that could be typically measured. And the arcminute - an angle - was essentially renamed nautical mile.
Knowing that the length in distance of arcminutes varies is a minor concern in navigation. So Brits had the most maps and the Admiralty nautical mile was rounded off to 6080 ft, close enough. And the fact that 1 nautical mile is somewhat close to a statute mile made distances easy to comprehend. Especially when making 3-4 knots in a ship.
And in calculation nautical miles times 60 equals degrees. And calculation is by trig function so no need for feet meters or statute miles.
Sad I never learned this in school 50 years ago and I ended up learning this by watching TV. Thanks for finally enlightening me. Thumbs up and subscribed!
@brucelyon6398
It is never too late to learn.
In school (& college) the studies, is rushed through. It never gives an opportunity to "learn" or savour what one learns. All that comes later. But yes, as a student one must learn where to look for, if one wants to learn a new thing. This generation is lucky in that (but true facts should be "presented", not some tales which are far from true & that demands discretion).
It's fun to think about the history of scientific thought; how a thought started, how it evolved, etc. So, they got the latitude (space) part right, then along came the addition of time, allowing for longitude. Such a great way to visualize Special Relativity and the concept of Space-Time. (General Relativity includes gravity)
Space time and GRAVITY, can you explain how the moon circle the earth when the earth travels 66600mpu?You can start with full moon when the sun,earth and moon are in line? Go in detail like your comment.
The Brother - Brother conversation style is a great way of doing this! Its like a podcast but I actually care.
This channel is about to blow up. Mark my words.
Funny, fantastic and just an all round great video thanks man !
Fun fact: The meter isn't actually 1/1000,000 of a quarter-meridian through Paris due to one of the surveyers making a mistake. To his credit, he realized it relatively soon after returning. Unfortunately by that point the Napoleonic wars had started and there wasn't really the bandwidth to re-do it, so they just went with the mistake. Later metrology conventions discussed revising the meter to actually be based on the meridian, but by that point there were too many prototype meters floating around for that to be practical. It was thus defined based on lines on a stick for many years, until Special Relativity and increasingly accurate measurement methods allowed a definition in terms of the second (defined based on the inverse frequency of the hyperfine transition of cesium) and the speed of light.
Bro this video makes me want to play FTL again.
Thought the exact same thing!
Glad you found a good cacio e pepe video to use in the pepper section of this video 🤣
good stuff. a great presentation to describe a complex idea.
That transition from thumbnail to video is pretty f*ckin clever
There's probably more people than ever before that "think" the Earth is flat.
There has always been a bit of "needle" between the Brits and the French about measurements. They hated Greenwich Mean Time being used the standard for navigation. As for the English language being the required language for the world airlines- - -
Fascinating! But you kinda missed "what is a knot"? The deal with a nautical mile being a geodesic with an arc that spans one minute of angle ( 1/60 of a degree). But what good is that? Well if you are on a ship and take a piece of a log or stick and throw it overboard with a string attached and a knot in the strong every 47 feet, then count how many knots pass out in 28 seconds the result is nautical miles per hour, or knots. You then pulled the log back in and entered the value in the ship's notebook along with the weather and any interesting items. This is the 'log' entry and the notebook came to be known as the ship's log.
You need a clock or egg-timer type little hourglass or something for the time. And the speed is speed through the water and does not account for currents, etc. Like air speed versus ground speed. And thus a nautical mile is one minute of arc on the Earth's surface. And a knot is one nautical mile per hour. The funny thing is naut and knot are not related etymologically.
Ship speed is deceiving because it travels day and night. A ship that only goes 6 miles per hours still travels 144 miles per day.
Fascinating. Well written.
The egg timer can be any convenient number of seconds, and the knots can be at any manageable distance apart ... PROVIDED they are calibrated to each other.
The secret is that they are both the same fraction of their respective units. A three-minute egg-timer is 1/20th of an hour, so the log line gets knots 1/20th of a mile apart.
It's probably easiest to buy a sandglass, check it for time, and then have someone tie knots in a rope to match it.
A story well told! And I learned something! Nice!
In geolocation tracking, coarse geolocation is accurate to a nautical mile (a minute of latitude) and fine geolocation is accurate to 1/60 of a nautical mile (a second of latitude).
"A minute is a mile" is what I heard while sailing in the South Pacific. A nautical mile of latitude.
^arcminute ^arcsecond💩💩🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
@johnb6723
While learning "surveying" in college, we used a chain of 100 links & were told it is 101⅓ feet (30.8 meters) long. It is the length of 1 "arc second". When I find location of paces written in 0.01 Arc Second as extreme accurate, that translates to 1 foot (30 cm), it really makes me laugh. Do we put a "pin" on that spot? Is this accuracy necessary?
what a fantastically explained video! I had no idea!
This channel is going to become massive.
Video was so good I forgot it was about nautical miles till the end.
@dylanst3802
Thank God, you didn't miss nautical miles, after all.
Very interesting and informative. Would be very helpful to make captions available. Also, unless I missed it, you never say how many miles is a nautical miles, 1.15.
Excellent video
found this channel today! subscribed and turned on notifications!
This was absolutely great, you got a new sub
Well done, guys. You just earned a sub. If DiscipeDojo had half your editing skills our channel would have exponentially more subscribers. :)
Most people don’t know nautical miles is always used in aviation too
My brain now hurts but thanks for the lesson
Finally someone that doesn’t sound scripted! Plus I learned something new
Hey alittle bit of a correction or I suppose re-correction. At 4:35 you indeed said correctly the first time that the higher the Sun is at noon, the closer you are to the equator. However, the picture in question shows us position calculated by the angle of POLARIS over the horizon, also known as the North Star. Calculating your latitude from the Polaris would infact be the reverse compared to calculating the latitude from the Sun's position due to the fact that Polaris is almost perfectly aligned with Earth's Northern axis of rotation. As in, when the Polaris is closer to the horizon, the closer you are to the equator. Ofcourse you couldn't use this technique on the southern hemisphere of the Earth, as the Earth itself would block the star. This is why on the southern hemisphere, part from measuring your latitude in relation to the sun, you'd use the Southern Cross constallation, which is a little less convinient way of measuring the latitude, and needs more calculating whn the constallation isn't at it's highest point on the sky. Other than that little hitch, what an excellent video! :)
@Zkarimus
Yes, you're right. "The higher the Sun is at noon, the closer you are to the equator" is a misstatement. It could be so on September 23 or March 21, only. On June 21 that means, you're on the tropic of Cancer, not the Equator.
what a underrated channel
For your next WTF is a [unit of measure] episode, I suggest the new (as of 2019) kilogram (which has a mass within a couple ppb of the previous kilogram). It's interesting how much cutting-edge science and technology makes an appearance in realizing the kilogram now.
"Wait, it's quantum mechanics?" Yes, yes it is!
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist1se cennt'anni vuoi campare, I to cazzi t'hai da fare
One minute of arc of latitude at the equator, or 6080.3 ft, depending on which spheroid you use. (2Pi x R)(Delta/360)To get knots, multiply miles by 1.1.
I’m not a sailor, but I am an aviator. Pilots flight plan and navigate using nautical miles. I never really understood why until I saw this video.
This is just a small part of the knowledge you gain in captains school. It’s cool tho. Global navigation is quite interesting.
What is that 🔥 soundtrack at 7:47?
I once worked at a subway and a got prank called. I went along with it. They asked how long was our footlongs... i responded in inches, feet, millimeters, lightyears, and nuatical miles. 😂
@Bach_Treebane
There are plenty of empty brains, idling for want of work, in this world ! This is the height of inventiveness. Do you what is "height of unemployment"? (I wouldn't tell that, there are ladies around)
The comedian Charles Haycock covered this in 1 of his routines. "You idiot, the Earth is a rhombus and you still work in the warehouse."
today i learnt something new. Thanks for sharing
No idea how you got into my recommendations, but i like the style 😊
I'd love to know understand the algorithm bro I think it's a wizard it s took shed or something
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title is the meme "Wtf is a kilometer?!" 😂
10:34 They don't seem to have read the whole thing:
the cable lentgh is supposed to be 1/10th of a nautical mile, i.e. 185.2 metres.
But in the Royal Navy it's 608 feet, or 185.3 metres, and in the US Navy, 120 fathoms, or 219.5 metres.
People think that medieval working class food was bland -- and it was, to our palate. But local spices were available. Garlic was considered vulgar by the upper class at one point because it is so common. To them it was fine because palates are relative. Spices were just yet another way for rich people to show off.
@CrizzyEyes
When the Ottoman Imperial duty, levied on Black pepper from Kochin & Calicut ports in India made black pepper cost its weight in gold, it made Chris Columbus sit up & think. His thinking (& knowledge of a Spherical Earth, differing from the then contemporary thinking, that Earth is a flat sheet; even now many Europeans swear by "Flat Earth") led to his effort to undertake the first European voyage across the breadth of Atlantic Ocean to "discovery of a Western sea-route to India" & discovery of Americas (instead), making all native Americans "Indians"! There can be no worse confusion than this for ostensibly knowledgeable people.
Great stuff. Excellent content
Can someone please tell me whats the name of the song with the guitars and violins?!?!? Near the beginning, its so familiar yet I have no idea where I've heard it!!!
And the 1/60 of a degree is why knots are measured in time. There are 60 minutes in a degree and 60 second in a minte and we measure the length of travel by measuring the time and speed using a log line that was a rope with knots tied in it at certain intervals. It was dropped with a wood end for drag and as it was released behind the ship the number of knots on the line that fed out where counted over a specific time which gaveyour speed in knots. And with the knot speed known you could use that speed with the time and know your distance traveled and thats why a latitude line was one degree, and that degree is 60 minutes and broke down to a smaller measurement of 60 seconds. The reason it was broken down from the 360 to the 1/60th is because of 60 minutes in an hour and the earth rotating at 24hours. So lat and long is measured in degrees minutes and seconds. So if you go north at 15 knots you will go one degree in 4 hours. And if you go 15 knots in say 1 hour and 15 seconds you can narrow that down to a specific point. Measurement on a nautical chart is only made using latitude lined because the degrees stay at a constant where longitude line degrees get smaller from the equator the further north or south you go.
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
did I hear the sounds the boats make in anno?
nice! Also good choice of music!
Columbus initially went west after convincing the Spanish monarchs it was an alternate route to India and China (for those spices), so they bankrolled his expedition. Not because he was discovering new lands for them. And that's why it's still called the 'West Indies'.
@NmpK24
But I think China was never in that picture (you must have added that, on a hunch). Till about 1100 AD, Europeans weren't even aware of China, though caravans ferried across Central Eurasia, goods & rats that infested Europe triggering "Great Plague". Alexander (the Great)'s world ended with India. His teacher, tutor & mentor, Aristotle was with him, to guide him.
@MrPoornakumar The Romans sent dignitaries to China. Europe knew, but it was a limited knowledge that was then further limited by the fall of Rome and the loss of half the Empire's accumulated knowledge give or take, with the other half in Constantinople.
The Roman mile was way shorter than the modern mile. In fact, even in Rome it was 1000 soldier's paces long only in theory. The "pace" was defined by them as 5ft which seems to be a lot longer than a real pace of an average soldier, and the 5ft pace was (if ever) probably only attainable over shorter very fast marches. I guess there had to be good propaganda value in presenting your army as having extraordinary abilities, but 1000 paces on an all-day long march was likely to be closer to a kilometer than the 1.4km of the officially defined mile. But, because the definition was based in a variable human action, it was easy for a commander to claim they had marched 100 miles because he was measuring the number of paces, but the actual distance traveled could have been much less.
In the Middle Ages various kings played the game of my mile is bigger than yours and so it grew to the current 1.6km length, and the Roman practice of dividing into 1000 yards became 1760 yards for no logical reason.
We can blame Medieval Christians for the current illogical mile definition rather than the Romans.
@artistjoh
1. If "only attainable (or attained) over shorter very fast marches", all of them Roman soldiers would have to undergo surgery for "Hydrocele" and unfit for military service, later.
2. You seem to suggest that Medieval Christians are stupider than Roman troops.
“You can do this at home, if you want to. Just climb to the top of a tall building and calculate the circumference of the earth.” Sure! Hold your breath, I’ll be right back!☝️
Wonderful video ! At minute 9:41 what 3d tool is are you using?
This is a really awesome quality video
I've read the Apollo missions used three different measurement systems. Imperial for launch operations, Nautical for the trip to the moon and orbital operations, and metric for the lunar surface.
Which goes to show why a Mars probe crashed when an oopsy of pounds seconds used in some calculations instead of Newton seconds.
No one in the US has ever used the Imperial system. It was created by an act of Parliament in 1820s… British Parliament. 1820s… get it? Decades after the US gained independence. The Imperial System is foreign to the US and is not compatible.
What you mean to say is US Customary.
The US is still deeply attached to:
Pounds, ounces
Gallons, pints, quarts, ounces
Feet, inches, fraction inches, yard
Acres
Miles, MPH
Fahrenheit
Inches Hg, PSI
Are these imperial units?
Liter is getting used more because beverage companies not law.
@@larryscott3982 There are slight differences between certain units in the Imperial system and the Customary system, though. Primarily when it comes to volume.
Yes, that came about because when the British reformed the volume units around the year 1800, the US was still angry at Britain (1776 anyone?) and never adopted the changes. The reformed units are the "imperial" units (eg: the imperial gallon is 4.54 liters, while the "US" gallon is 3.78 liters).
My man, you left some stuff out.
1. A nautical mile is about 2000 yards or 6000 feet.
2. A "Knot" is a measurement of speed, was based on the 2000 yard/6000ft nautical mile.
3. How a "knot" came to be a measurement of speed.
4. Understanding dead reckoning (Time/Speed/Distance).
2:15 "Conquer"? Not exactly. Mostly "invaded" (2:56 is correct)/"took by force". Conquering and invading bear different meanings. Thank you.
@mentalizatelo
Thank you. I wish more guys here, are as precise as you are.
Great graphics, bong toke descriptions.
4:32 great video but in this section you keep saying you can measure the sun, but didn't they use other stars in the night sky? for example, the graphic you're pointing to says polaris, not the sun.
That they did. They used observations both of local noon and of the moons of Jupiter to set their chronometers to find accurate longitudes.
They needed a set of two clocks for the job: one kept on Greenwich time, and the other reset for observed local noon, using a sextant to find the exact moment the sun was highest right there.
This led to the curious naval, and navigational, habit of figuring each calendar day noon-to-noon rather than the landlubber midnight to midnight. With sextant and clock, they knew for sure what bloody time it was.
Is the Faster Than Light soundtrack royalty-free or something? It's popping up everywhere
Excellent video, I learned a lot.
“That’s an unfortunate side effect” well it is unfortunate for us. For the Europeans it was very beneficial
Very good channel and video
Great video!
1.5 mins into this video and it's really visually engaging and edifying - Thanks!
WTF!? Your channel carries itself like it has at least 2 million subs, but you dont even have 7000 yet!? Lets fix this now!❤
Great detail. Excellent job. But as usual, it leads to more questions. As in how a nautical mile relates to a knot (as in doing 5 knots). And did the distance of a knot differ in the old days to what it does now and how does iit match up to a nautical mile these days or are they completely separate?
A knot isn’t a unit of distance, it’s a unit of speed defined as 1 nautical mile per hour
@@MS-qx9uwand a nautical mile is…. Distance
@@melody3741 yes
They’re called knots because sailors used a rope with knots tied in it, and attached to a small plank. The distance between knots was a careful specification as was the shape and size of the wood plank attached. It was thrown overboard and the knots that were dragged out were counted for 28 seconds by a sand glass. And that was developed to approximate the distance per hour at 6080 ft per nautical mile.
And more unit confusion: the distance between knots in the rope was 8 fathoms.
@@larryscott3982 That is basically what I was trying to clarify. Since the space between the knots on the rope is a distance that was guesstimated to relate to the distance of a nautical mile (or is that an error?) and now we have a different number for the length of a nautical mile to when "knots" was invented, what does that do to the meaning of knots of speed? I.e. if one were to travel for 1 hour at 100 knots, how much distance was actually covered? 100 nautical miles or just something close to it? Or am I just confusing the notion of knots reflecting nautical miles covered per unit time? Maybe I should stick to measuring my velocity in kph and distance traveled in miles or visa- ersa.
8:38 but why?
I am happy I found this video. Instant sub.
Great upload, thanks. Very much related: I recommend the book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. It's a great, brief, fascinating history tale primarily about the tricky issue of determining latitude at sea
No, it's about the difficulty of finding your longitude at sea. Latitude is how far north or south you've gone, longitude is how far west or east you've gone.
There's a video by a couple Englishman called, map men longitude, it explains in a concise easy to understand way not a shill just trying to be helpful I'ma a Kentucky hillbilly and I understand it lol. This video here is really to glad I found it
@kleinjahr Having accurate clocks on ships solved the problem. Of course the technology took time to develop. Pardon the pun
So, how far is it from the north pole to Pittsburgh Pa. I need to know because I'm thinking of applying for work at Santa's workshop, and I might have to commute.
Google earth it, ask Google.
That was great. Good job.
You mentioned that it wasn't until 1970 that the British got the memo about the standardised nautical mile, but when will the Americans get the memo about metric, something the British got many years ago?
Americans pretty much ignored the fiat imposition of the metric, but American use of metric day to day is gradually increasing.
Fact: 1 Scandinavian mile (Mil) is equal to 10 kilometers, it is used in Sweden and Norway.
Denmark abandoned it though 😭
Speaking to the 1000 paces, our "English" mile would be a pace of about 5 feet 4 inches, quite a long stride unless the Romans meant each placement of the right or left foot; what we would consider 2 paces...
What makes the US late adoption of the nautical mile kinda worry-sum is that all the gps satellites are run by the US Military.
@patginni5229
Even US employs speed in "knots" that presupposes distance in nautical miles.
I didn't know this French developed measurement replaced the one sixtieth of a degree standard. A Nautical mile is 6078 feet or one minute of arc of the Earth's circumference . A Statute mile is 5280.
I'm guessing but one reason why the Brits were late taking up the French definition was that the Royal Navy had mapped and produced some of the best maps and they had worked very well.