Lawrence Hall of Science University of California, Berkeley

PASS Planetarium Activities for Student Success Please send new material for this page to Alan Gould News and Articles on Who "Discovered" America? Web Items Fall, 2001, Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude! by Rick Sanders (Full text of article from Fall 2001 21st Century) -- http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall01/navigators/navigators.html -- "Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui [under the guidance of Eratosthenes] set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. ...One of the navigational instruments which Maui had with him was a strange looking "calculator" that he called a tanawa; such an instrument was known, in 1492, as a torquetum." Building and Using Maui's Tanawa by Bertram Cooper (Full text of article from Fall 2001 21st Century) -- http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall01/Tanawa/tanawa.html August, 1997 The Navigational Mysteries and Fraudulent Longitudes of Christopher Columbus -- A Lecture given to the Society for the History of Discoveries and the Haklyut Society by Keith A. Pickering http://www1.minn.net/~keithp/shd973.htm Celestial Navigation http://www.amtsgym-sdbg.dk/as/rw/seaandsp.htm Books and Magazine Articles Sep-Oct 2002. Flattening the Earth, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mercury Magazine, pp. 34-38. Contrary to popular folklore, medieval Europeans knew Earth was a sphere, and, with the notable exception of Christopher Columbus, most had a pretty good idea of its true size. Trefil, James, Rounding the Earth; Astronomy Magazine, August 2000, pp. 38-44. Centuries before Columbus, ancient astronomers percieved graceful curvatures in their universe.

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