A number of early cultures used
lodestone so they could turn, as magnetic compasses for navigation. Early mechanical compasses are referenced in written records of the
Chinese, who began using it for navigation "some time before 1050, possibly as early as 850." The first recorded appearance of the use of the compass in Europe (1190) as a description of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in
Alexander Neckam's
De naturis rerum (On the Natures of Things), written in 1190. However, there are questions over diffusion. Some historians suggest that the Arabs introduced the compass from China to Europe. Some suggested the compass was transmitted from China to Europe and the Islamic world via the Indian Ocean, or was brought by the crusaders to Europe from China. However, some scholars have proposed an independent European invention of the compass.
China (206 BC–220 AD) south-indicating ladle or
sinan made of magnetized lodestones. These are noteworthy
Chinese literary references in evidence for its antiquity: • The magnetic compass was first invented as a device for
divination as early as the
Chinese Han dynasty and
Tang dynasty (since about 206 BC). The compass was used in
Song dynasty China by the military for
navigational orienteering by 1040–44, and was used for maritime navigation by 1111 to 1117. • The earliest
Chinese literature reference to magnetism lies in the 4th century BC writings of
Wang Xu (鬼谷子): "The lodestone attracts iron." The book also notes that the people of the state of Zheng always knew their position using a "south-pointer"; some authors suggest that this refers to early use of the compass. • The first mention of a spoon, speculated to be a lodestone, observed "pointing in a
cardinal direction" is a Chinese work composed between 70 and 80 AD (
Lunheng), which records that "But when the south-pointing spoon is thrown upon the ground, it comes to rest pointing at the south." Within the text, the author
Wang Chong describes the spoon as a phenomenon that he has personally observed. Although the passage does not explicitly mention magnetism, according to Chen-Cheng Yih, the "device described by Wang Chong has been widely considered to be the earliest form of the magnetic compass." Another text, the
Chiu Thien Hsuan Nu Chhing Nang Hai Chio Ching ("Blue Bag Sea Angle Manual") from around the same period, also has an implicit description of magnetic declination. It has been argued that this knowledge of declination requires the use of the compass. • The earliest reference to a specific magnetic "direction finder" device for land navigation is recorded in a
Song dynasty book dated to 1040–44. There is a description of an iron "south-pointing fish" floating in a bowl of water, aligning itself to the south. The device is recommended as a means of orientation "in the obscurity of the night." The
Wujing Zongyao (武經總要, "Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques") stated: "When troops encountered gloomy weather or dark nights, and the directions of space could not be distinguished...they made use of the [mechanical]
south-pointing carriage, or the south-pointing fish." • The first incontestable reference to a "magnetized needle" in Chinese literature appears in 1088. mariner's compass Thus, the use of a magnetic compass by the military for
land navigation occurred sometime before 1044, but incontestable evidence for the use of the compass as a maritime navigational device did not appear until 1117. The typical Chinese navigational compass was in the form of a magnetic needle floating in a bowl of water. According to
Needham, the Chinese in the
Song dynasty and continuing
Yuan dynasty did make use of a dry compass, although this type never became as widely used in China as the wet compass. Evidence of this is found in the
Shilin Guang Ji ("Guide Through the Forest of Affairs"), published in 1325 by Chen Yuanjing, although its compilation had taken place between 1100 and 1250. The dry compass in China was a dry suspension compass, a wooden frame crafted in the shape of a turtle hung upside down by a board, with the lodestone sealed in by wax, and if rotated, the needle at the tail would always point in the northern cardinal direction. the Chinese design of the suspended dry compass persisted in use well into the 18th century. However, according to Kreutz there is only a single Chinese reference to a dry-mounted needle (built into a pivoted wooden tortoise) which is dated to between 1150 and 1250 and claims that there is no clear indication that Chinese mariners ever used anything but the floating needle in a bowl until the 16th century.
Zheng He's Navigation Map, also known as the "
Mao Kun Map", contains a large amount of detail "needle records" of
Zheng He's expeditions.
Medieval Europe .
Alexander Neckam reported the use of a magnetic compass for the region of the English Channel in the texts
De utensilibus and
De naturis rerum, written between 1187 and 1202, after he returned to England from France and prior to entering the Augustinian abbey at Cirencester. In his 1863 edition of
Neckam's
De naturis rerum, Thomas Wright provides a translation of the passage in which Neckam mentions sailors being guided by a compass' needle: ''The sailors, moreover, as they sail over the sea, when in cloudy whether they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the darkness of the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what point of the compass their ship's course is directed, they touch the magnet with a needle, which (the needle) is whirled round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks direct to the north.'' In 1269
Petrus Peregrinus of Maricourt described a floating compass for astronomical purposes as well as a dry compass for seafaring, in his well-known
Epistola de magnete. went hand in hand with improvements in
dead reckoning methods, and the development of
Portolan charts, leading to more navigation during winter months in the second half of the 13th century. The additional few months were of considerable economic importance. For instance, it enabled
Venetian convoys to make two round trips a year to the
Levant, instead of one. Between 1295 and 1302,
Flavio Gioja converted the compass from a needle floating in water to what we use today, a round box with a compass card that rotates 360 degrees attached to a magnetic element. At the same time, traffic between the Mediterranean and northern Europe also increased, with the first evidence of direct commercial voyages from the Mediterranean into the English Channel coming in the closing decades of the 13th century, and one factor may be that the compass made traversal of the
Bay of Biscay safer and easier. However, critics like Kreutz have suggested that it was later in 1410 that anyone really started steering by compass.
Muslim world 's diagram of the compass and Qibla. From MS Cairo TR 105, copied in Yemen, 1293. The earliest
Arabic reference to a compass, in the form of magnetic needle in a bowl of water, comes from a work by Baylak al-Qibjāqī, written in 1282 while in Cairo. Al-Qibjāqī described a needle-and-bowl compass used for navigation on a voyage he took from Syria to Alexandria in 1242. In a treatise about
astrolabes and
sundials, al-Ashraf includes several paragraphs on the construction of a compass bowl (ṭāsa). He then uses the compass to determine the north point, the
meridian (khaṭṭ niṣf al-nahār), and the Qibla. This is the first mention of a compass in a medieval Islamic scientific text and its earliest known use as a Qibla indicator, although al-Ashraf did not claim to be the first to use it for this purpose. In 1300, an Arabic treatise written by the
Egyptian astronomer and
muezzin Ibn Simʿūn describes a dry compass used for determining qibla. Like Peregrinus' compass, however, Ibn Simʿūn's compass did not feature a compass card.
Arab navigators also introduced the 32-point
compass rose during this time. In 1399, an Egyptian reports two different kinds of magnetic compass. One instrument is a “fish” made of willow wood or pumpkin, into which a magnetic needle is inserted and sealed with tar or wax to prevent the penetration of water. The other instrument is a dry compass. 's compass rose, 1607 In the 15th century, the description given by
Ibn Majid while aligning the compass with the pole star indicates that he was aware of
magnetic declination. An explicit value for the declination is given by
ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Wafāʾī (fl. the 1450s in Cairo).
Friedrich Hirth suggested that Arab and Persian traders, who learned about the polarity of the magnetic needle from the Chinese, applied the compass for navigation before the Chinese did. However, Needham described this theory as "erroneous" and "it originates because of a mistranslation" of the term
chia-ling found in
Zhu Yu's book
Pingchow Table Talks.
India The development of the magnetic compass is highly uncertain. The compass is mentioned in fourth-century AD
Tamil nautical books; moreover, its early name of
macchayantra (fish machine) suggest a Chinese origin. In its Indian form, the wet compass often consisted of a fish-shaped magnet, float in a bowl filled with oil.
Medieval East Africa There is evidence that the distribution of the compass from China likely also reached eastern Africa by way of trade through the end of the Silk Road that ended in
East African centre of trade in
Somalia and the
Swahili city-state kingdoms. There is evidence that Swahili maritime merchants and sailors acquired the compass at some point and used it for navigation. == Dry compass ==