“Big -GIS Data” in the 1850s – Matthew Fontine Maury’s Wind and Current Charts

Kurt Schlichting, Fairfield University

By the time of Columbus (1492), sailors could determine latitude, which is the nautical distance north or south from the equator. Longitude was much more difficult. In 1719, the British government established a monetary prize for a method to solve the “longitude problem.” John Harrison, a British clockmaker, invented the marine chronometer and won. Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806 – 1873), Superintendent of the Naval Observatory in Washington, studied thousands of logbooks and their data on wind direction and strength. He circulated “Log Abstracts” for sailing ships’ navigators to record their longitude and latitude at noon as well as sailing directions, barometer, temperature, and wind direction and strength. By 1855 the Naval Observatory had collected and categorized 1,159,353 data points, each with longitude and latitude. Maury published Wind and Current Charts (1848) of the world’s oceans to show sailors the advantage of using the currents and wind data. This information drastically reduced the length of ocean voyages by following his “tracks in the sea” using specific longitude and latitude data points on nautical charts of the world’s oceans.

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 Presented in Session 207. Advancing Spatial Methods