Early history of the compass
The history of the compass can be traced back to the use of lodestones used by Chinese fortune tellers on their fortune telling boards as early as 200 AD. Lodestones, although rare, are a product of mother nature. They are primarily composed of magnetite. When magnetite becomes magnetized, probably from a lightning strike, you have a lodestone.
At some point it was observed that the handle of the spoon shaped lodestones pointed consistently to the south. This led to a board being contructed with drawings of directions and constellations and the lodestone sitting in the middle of the board. By 800 AD magnetized needles were used instead of the lodestones. They were either hung by a silk thread or placed on a piece of wood in a bowl of water. The compass was adopted as a navigation device on ships as early as 1000 AD.
Did the Chinese hide boxes of booty in the woods and use these ancient tools to seek them out?
At some point it was observed that the handle of the spoon shaped lodestones pointed consistently to the south. This led to a board being contructed with drawings of directions and constellations and the lodestone sitting in the middle of the board. By 800 AD magnetized needles were used instead of the lodestones. They were either hung by a silk thread or placed on a piece of wood in a bowl of water. The compass was adopted as a navigation device on ships as early as 1000 AD.
Did the Chinese hide boxes of booty in the woods and use these ancient tools to seek them out?
1 Comments:
Actually the history of the compass is much older and more interesting than the author's version. Liuren astrolabes are the ancestor of the shi or shipan, which was the first magnetic compass (invented somewhere around the 2nd century BCE, during the early Han era).
The shipan consisted of a metal plate with a "south-pointing spoon," also cast of metal. The spoon was designed to point south (it requires a long discussion to explain why). The shape of the spoon was designed to reflect the shape of the Ladle constellations (the most recent being Beidou, what we call the Big Dipper), because these were astronomical timekeepers for Chinese (and had been for millennia). Models of the shi made only a few centuries earlier showed the Ladle at the center, but it was carved into the device.
The shipan was used solely for the ethnoscience of fengshui. The designs on any models of shi and shipan are the markings and characters still known and used in fengshui.
Several hundred years later, someone on the coast realized that having a magnetized needle on a navigation compass was much more efficient than using the shi or shipan or its ancestor, the liuren astrolabe.
The liuren astrolabe may date back to the Zhou era, but the earliest sighlines seem to date to practices noticed by archaeologists at Banpo (approximately 4000 BCE, in Yangshao culture), because those practices have a continuity that's displayed to the present.
Liuren from Qin-era tombs display the same markings found thousands of years earlier on jade carvings; the shi and shipan share them as well. In fact, elements of the compass rose design look suspiciously like those carved into a piece of Chinese jade dated c. 3000 BCE.
And all of these devices were the tools not of "Chinese fortune tellers," but of astronomers and other officials in the administrations of rulers.
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