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The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World

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Amir Aczel's _The Riddle of the Compass_ tells a sweeping tale spanning continents and centuries. While this tale includes some discussion of the natural history of the earth's geological composition, magnetic field, and recent research showing that certain nerve fibers in fish are sensitive to this magnetic field and may play a role in their migratory behavior, the book concentrates on the human history of navigation and how the development of the compass spurred commerce, trade, and the expansion of European naval powers.

He weaves into this tale a survey of maritime navigational techniques used in antiquity by the Greeks and Egyptians. He gives an impressively well-researched survey of the references to the compass in European writings, the earliest dating to 1187 by the English Augustinian Monk Alexander Neckam. Aczel touches on a number of unusual subjects that turn out to be connected to the compass in surprising ways: the Chinese art of feng shui, ancient Chinese divination practices, Aegean archeology, including a particular Etruscan chandelier, the travels of Marco Polo, the development of cartography and nautical charts in medieval Europe. Along the way he treats the reader to a crash course in Italian history ranging from the Roman empire, the Crusades, through the rise of the city-states Amalfi, Naples, and Venice, the navigational methods employed by the great Spanish and Portuguese explorers such as Magellan, da Gama, and Columbus, and some interesting trivia such as the real meaning and origin of the phrase "to sail the seven seas" and how a possibly misplaced comma bears on the identity of the man who at one time was thought to have invented the compass, and of whom the residents of Amalfi erected a statue as a tribute.

Like his earlier books, this one is accessible, entertaining, and edifying. The narrative has a natural flow and the stamp of Aczel's personal connection with the subject. (He spent much of his youth working on board a Mediterranean cruise ship that his father captained.) In places, footnotes would have been helpful. While there is a useful bibliography, certain passages in the text cry out for specific documentation. For example, he mentions that Jesuit priests in 17th century China ordered the prohibition, and even burning of books on the subject of feng shui. It would have been helpful to see specific documentation for such claims. Aside from this, _The Riddle of the Compass_ is an admirable book that uncovers a little-known history of the compass, a navigational tool so common today that we take it for granted, and discusses how, by radically improving maritime navigation, it changed the world by opening up new possibilities of commerce and conquest.

If you think of objects in the category "inventions that changed the world," you might not think of the compass right off the bat, but a good case can be made for it having changed the world more than any invention since the wheel. Amir Aczel makes that case convincingly in _The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World_ (Harcourt), an entertaining look at an invention most of us don't use every day but which has gotten used on our behalf for centuries. He starts in Amalfi, home of Flavio Gioia, the inventor of the compass. Well, he wasn't really the inventor, as the Chinese were using it, sometime before 1040 CE, and Flavio lived around the fourteenth century. What he invented was the nautical compass box, with the familiar star on the disc with the elaborate arrow that always points north. Actually, he probably didn't even invent that. He probably didn't even exist. It is a funny story as to how he came to be regarded as the inventor of the compass, and even got his statue in the center of Amalfi, when he probably was a nonentity.

The Chinese had trade only by land and river, so there was little reason for the compass to be developed as a navigational tool. It was, essentially, a mysterious toy. They used the compass for feng shui. The practical use perfected in Amalfi was passed, when Amalfi lost its power base, to the glory and enrichment of Venice. With a compass, Venetian ships could sail during clouded winters, and could become huge transports. When other nations began using it for transoceanic trade, they put Venice into eclipse, and brought on our modern world.

Aczel covers the long era of pre-compass navigation, showing how sailors were dependent on clear skies and on the lead-weighted sounding line, which could tell the depth. They also used seasonal knowledge of winds and currents, and even looking for the traveling patterns of birds and sea snakes. He spurns the idea that they only piloted by "hugging the shore," which would never explain how they managed when they left sight of land, and which represents taking on the greatest of navigational risks, running aground. The compass, when we got around to using it, changed all that: "A great invention can lie dormant or be used for secondary purposes for a very long time and then suddenly be discovered by the right people - individuals with vision and an entrepreneurial spirit - and be exploited to its fullest extent. When this happens, such inventions can change the way we live." Aczel, a fine popular science writer who has most recently written on Fermat's Last Theorem and on the mathematical search for infinity, has here combined national histories, sea lore, and personal insight to make an absorbing history of an underrated tool.

Amir Aczel presents us with the story of the origins of the compass, in as much detail as scholars have been able to discover. Aczel covers the use of the compass with ancient mariners and how these mariners had to rely on other navigational aids in the days before the compass, such as wind, plants, sounding lines, sea life, geography, currents, etc.. Also mentioned as well is the use of stars in determining latitude, longitude was much more difficult to determine due to the lack of accurate chronometers in early times.

Much of this volume deals with the origin of the 16 point wind rose and how it became incorporated into the modern compass, documented with events and ancient documents in China, and Italy, up to medival times and beyond. This includes discussions of the Etruscans, the cities of Amalfi and Venice, the explorer Marco Polo, all relating to the development of the compass. The second to last chapter sketches the voyages in the Great Age Of Exploration which were vastly aided by the compass, in addition to the astrolabe, a precursor of the sextant.

I believe that Amir Aczel made a very good case here that the compass is one of the pivitol inventions of humanity. Ask yourself this: if the compass had never been invented (which would have slowed down trade and the exchange of information and ideas) how many years of progress would have been lost? My wild guess is 50-100 years of lost progress, a lot.

This is easily the best book on the history of science I have seen in the last decade. Many people write books purporting to "explain" science to the average citizen, but few of them ever succeed in this task. Aczel really knows his stuff well. He clearly spent a tremendous amount of effort researching how the compass came about, from where, and by whom. In this delightful little book he surveys the history, debunks some myths, and tells a great story.

This is a fascinating book. It does not overwhelm you with scientific facts--just tells a good story. The mysteries in this book are not solved, which makes the book better. It leaves something for the reader's imagination. I enjoyed his history of Amalfi, Naples, Etruria, and Venice. I thought the delivery was quite good. And the ending left you thinking. I wish more science books were written with such an eye for detail and mystery rather than technical stuff.

What a little mess of a book. You see, as it turns out, there isn't really much of a riddle to the invention of the compass. In fact, there isn't really much of a story to the invention of the compasss, or if there is, Dr. Aczel has not stumbled upon it.

So, in order to fill out the pages of this small book, the author spins some unrelated stories that he then tries to somehow pin to the "riddle of the compass." For instance, we are treated to a history of Venice from the Romans to Napolean. Why? Well it seems that as seafaring people, the Venetians probably USED the compass. Or another entire chapter on the travels of Marco Polo to China that ends by noting -- not that Marco Polo had ANYTHING to do with the compass -- but that his travels "prove the feasibility of transport between China and the West. [Polo's] journeys underscore the likelihood that sometime between the Roman era and his own peiord a compass would have arrived in Europe among the many goods that traveled the routes he and his father and uncle took in the late Middle Ages." (I guess I was under the impression that the existence of SOME East-West trade during the Middle Ages was pretty well-accepted. But the Polo trip fills 12 pages of text.)

In these types of books, the relevant digressions are often the essence of what makes for fascinating reading. But here the digressions are almost comically tagential. One feels that Dr. Aczel, if assigned to explicate the story of Little Red Riding Hood, would somehow find his way to a discussion of McCarty-era red-baiting in the little town of Hood, Oregon.

Because there is little to say on the topic, the author struggles to make what might have been a magazine article into a book. As a consequence, the story being told feels silly and the book is poorly organized and frustrating to read.

First off, the name of the book is misleading. There is no real riddle here. He just explains the origins of the compass, and the slight mystery of whom invented it. Nothing much else about it.

He starts off with a bit of history, starting with what was done before the compass was invented. Then he describes how the simple magnet in water was discovered, and how it evolved it what it is today. He goes into the ancient Chinese origins, then the Italian invention and refinement, and then to the Portuguese navigators.

Though not a gripping tale, it's basically an interesting history lesson.

Aczel describes the compass as the second most important technological innovation in history, after the wheel. He then proceeds to wander through a series of brief histories without chronological order, giving disproportionate attention to a man who may or may not have lived in Amalfi, Italy. Aczel is at his best in capsule histories of maritime activity, but is frustratingly unsystematic in his chronologies and his descriptions of how the compass is used. He mentions the Global Positioning System, but does not tell us how it works. The figure titled "how the magnetic compass works" is misleading, as it shows the axis of the Earth's magnetic field coinciding with the Earth's axis of rotation. One gets the impression of a hastily written book.

I don't know how Aczel did it in 170 pages, but he did it! For someone like me, who doesn't know a lot about European and Chinese history, he did an amazing job explaining the material so I could both understand the events and appreciate their historical significance: How the compass was invented in China, how it came to Amalfi in southern Italy, how it then became the instrument of choice for Venetian navigators, and how it truly changed the world. Bravo!

This is a concise history of the greatest technological invention since the wheel, according to the author. The magnetic compass opened the world up for exploration and trade. A simple discovery made thousands of years ago was developed further in Italy eight hundred years ago, and resulted in a marvelous tool for navigators. They no longer had to rely on good weather to see the stars or the sun to determine directions. The compass opened the seas to navigation, and hence made world trade possible. The book does a good job tracing the invention from China to Europe and beyond and arguing for the importance of this invention.