The History of Air Navigation Group commissioned the author to provide a brief account of airborne DR development by discussing both the methods and the equipment used in the air. This second and final part covers the period after 1940 which saw the automation of DR techniques from the Air Position Indicator of the 1940s to the Flight Management Systems in current use.

Three textual works by Olaus Magnus (1490–1557) hold the key to the ‘compass’ on his invented island of Hvitsark, shown on his 1539 Carta marina. Although Olaus had little general understanding of the magnetic compass or of navigation in the Far North, he evidently did not intend the navigational device he drew on Hvitsark to represent a magnetic compass, but a sundial. His muddled ideas about the relationship between 12 wind-directions and direction-finding at sea by means of such a dial appear related to his second-hand information about a gnomonic navigational device used by the medieval Norse.

This paper is based on the President's Invitational Address given by the author at the 54th Annual General Meeting on 25 October 2000.

The paper outlines the changes in the physical form in which hydrographic information has reached the chart tables of ordinary navigators over the last five hundred years and traces its development from a purely verbal aid to a graphic one.

The History of Air Navigation Group commissioned the author to provide a brief account of airborne DR development by discussing both the methods and the equipment used in the air. This first part covers the period before 1940. The split is arbitrary, although it is obvious from a British perspective that military events around that date had a major impact on the pace of navigation development. However, it is equally obvious that airborne DR developed alongside a worldwide technical and intellectual revolution. This aspect of the story is abstract and involves some conjecture, so the paper takes it for granted and concentrates instead on practical matters. Accounts of air navigators' experiences as well as material on DR theory and descriptions of DR equipment in navigation manuals, journals and various surviving research documents have been used as the source material.

This paper discusses the knowledge and culture of astronomy possessed by the Maya civilisation and how this might have been used for marine navigation in the 8th Century. Comparison is made with the European view and use of celestial positioning.

The Eva G. R. Taylor Lecture is jointly sponsored by the Institute with the Royal Geographical Society, the Hakluyt Society and the Society for Nautical Research to enable a lecture to be given every year by a distinguished scholar in one or other of the branches of knowledge to which Professor Taylor made such notable contributions. The 1999 lecture was presented at a meeting held at the Royal Geographical Society on 30 November 1999. Michael Richey first describes the events leading up to the dramatic announcement by Yale University in 1974 that the famous Vinland Map it had acquired some nine years before might well be a fake; and then the steps taken to try to rehabilitate it. Professor Taylor was almost certainly the first scholar to set down in detail the reasons for believing the map to be a forgery. The map remains a mystery, for while the evidence seems for the most part to point towards forgery, who by and when and why remain in the air. Michael Richey is a Gold Medallist and a former Director of the Institute.

This paper was first published in Astronomy and Geophysics (December 1998, Vol. 39) by the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd and is reproduced here, with minor amendments, by kind permission of the Editor, Dr Sue Bowler.

William Wales (1734–1798) contributed to astronomy through his observations of the 1769 transit of Venus, and his studies of latitude and longitude on Captain James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas. During this voyage, Wales was responsible for monitoring the performance of the chronometers. After returning from the Pacific, Wales took charge of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital in London and, over the next two decades, he taught a succession of budding officers the principles of navigation.

Russia has had a quite unique development as a sea power. The 20th of October 1696 has been considered as the date of the Russian Fleet's creation when the supreme legislative body of Russia – the Boyar Duma – decreed that there should be a ship-building programme for the State's need. So, in 1996, we celebrate the tercentenary of the founding of the Russian Fleet (Figure 1).

This paper is based on one presented by the author at the Maritime Technology 21st Century Conference held at the University of Melbourne in November 1992.

Columbus's first voyage to America has been widely regarded as a considerable feat of navigation. Feat it certainly was, but the great advances in navigation during the fifteenth century were in fact made by the Portuguese, whose adaptation and development of Mediterranean methods to the more demanding requirements of the ocean made the European voyages of discovery possible. It was in Portugal too, probably during the years 1478–85, that Columbus acquired his knowledge of navigation. This paper, which was presented to a meeting at Brown University, USA on 26 September 1989, where the author was Gulbenkian Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, examines navigational practice in the Mediterranean during the late middle ages and its subsequent development during the Great Age of Discovery.

As the title indicates, this paper is principally concerned with navigation as a profession, rather than the essential activity of finding the way there and back again that is continually practised by the whole of humankind. By a profession, I mean the acquisition of a set of defined skills through training and the exercising of those skills as a way of earning a living for most, if not all, of a working lifetime. And looking at the profession of navigation, two interesting facts emerge; one is that it is not a particularly old profession - a century and a half, maybe. The second is that it is not likely to get very much older, at least in the form we know it today.

This paper, and the following one, were originally presented at an Institute afternoon meeting held at the RAF Museum, Hendon, on 5 June 1991. This first paper gives a personal view of the development and use of radionavigation techniques in the UK in World War II. The second paper gives some technical background to the systems discussed in the first one.

This paper is based on the Eva G. R. Taylor lecture given by the author at the Royal Geographical Society on 28 November 1990. The precise landfall of Columbus in the New World has been the subject of discussion for many years owing to various interpretations of the information given by copies of his log and his own statement that his San Salvador lay about 28° north. The twofold aims of the author's 1989 voyage were: first, to experiment with fifteenth-century methods and instruments to find out by practical experimentation how accurate the navigation at the time might have been and so cast light on this 4° error in latitude; and secondly, to follow the navigation information given by Columbus as closely as possible to assess the effect of the currents on his dead reckoning as clues as to his landfall.

During the 1939–1945 conflict, the development of navigational aids, particularly for the purpose of bombing the opposing nation, took place at an unprecedented rate. The life of any system was only the period of time it took scientists of the opposing nation to determine the nature of the aid and devise an appropriate countermeasure. So much so that in several cases, the time from conception to operational service could be measured in months.