How was the compass introduced to Europe?
In the Northern Song Dynasty, about 10 century, China people had used compasses to sail at sea. This has played a great role in the development of maritime traffic and economic and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries. In the book "Zhou Ping Ketan" written by Mi Zhu in the Northern Song Dynasty, there is such a passage: "There are hundreds of people on the sea, and there are hundreds of people in small places ... The owner knows geography, so he watches the stars at night, the sun at night and the compass at dusk." When translating this passage, some foreign scholars mistakenly translated the word "Jia Ling" (the order of the Southern Song Dynasty government) into the name of the Arab captain who traveled at sea, thus making mistakes again and again, and drawing the wrong conclusion that it was not the China ships that first equipped the compass, but the Arab ships. In fact, in the Middle Ages, the hulls of Arab ships were too small to hold 100 people. At that time, there were only China ships that could accommodate hundreds of people among the merchant ships traveling between the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and even Arab businessmen often took China ships. The maritime trade between China and Arabia was very frequent in Song Dynasty. Large ships sailing to Arabia have compass navigation, so it is easy for Arabs to learn the usage of compass from merchant ships in China.
Although scholars in ancient Greece and Rome have long known that magnets can attract iron, they have not known the directionality of magnets for a long time. When Europeans finally understood and mastered this natural phenomenon, they were more than a thousand years behind China. However, the compass made of magnets is more than 300 years behind China, and the artificial magnet is more than 0/00 years behind China. It is worth noting that the navigation compass used by early Europeans is the same as that of China, and the manufacturing method is almost the same as that of China. This series of convergence phenomena can only be explained by technology communication.
/kloc-Before the first half of the third century, Europeans were still in the imitation stage of China's compass in the Song Dynasty. At this time, no matter in theory or practice, Europeans did not make great achievements, nor did they surpass the compass application level of China in Song Dynasty.
/kloc-In the second half of the third century, the European compass began to be localized through the research of French experimental physicist Pierre. With the introduction of China's drought compass into Europe, the French improved it and put it in a container with a glass cover to become a portable instrument. Later, this portable compass was widely used by sailors all over Europe.
Before there was a compass, navigation could only calculate the approximate position by staring at the stars. After the compass appeared, sailors could not only determine their bearings, but sometimes even calculate the mileage between two places. Since then, ocean-going fleets of various countries have walked safely between the sea and the sky according to the routes, courses and mileage recorded and calculated by charts and compasses.
The application of compass in navigation made it possible for Columbus to discover the new continent of America and Magellan to sail around the world. This has greatly accelerated the development of the world economy and provided an indispensable prerequisite for the development of capitalism.
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