GPS in the dock

08 Mar 2011

You may well have read or heard in the news today about a new report on the vulnerability of satellite navigation systems from the Royal Academy of Engineering. According to their press release:
'Society may already be dangerously over-reliant on satellite radio navigation systems like GPS... The range of applications using the technology is now so broad that, without adequate independent backup, signal failure or interference could potentially affect safety systems and other critical parts of the economy.'
 
Of course, our research on the Board of Longitude won't include the development of satellite navigation (a rather more modern thing than we have time to look into), but there are interesting parallels we can draw between the eighteenth century and today. It's also something we can bear in mind as we begin to think about a longitude exhibition we are planning to have at the National Maritime Museum in 2014.

Firstly, there is the point that it is unwise to rely on a single system. Eighteenth-century navigators appreciated this very well, which is why they were keen to see the development of a range of solutions to the longitude problem but also kept on using older methods such as dead reckoning (which is still a part of navigation today). Rather than being rivals, timekeepers and lunars were complementary, adding to the seafarer's armoury of available techniques.

A second point is the persistence of concerns about relying on technology at all. This was certainly a concern to many people in the eighteenth century, including the Board of Longitude, as they considered John Harrison's timekeepers. A question for them was whether such incredibly complex, sophisticated machines could be trusted over very long distances, which was something that James Cook's voyages helped to answer.