Some of you might remember my bafflement regarding the use of “knots” as a unit of measuring airspeed (and waterspeed). Well, my old friend Tom from the workplace back in KC sent me this explanation. And I believe him because A) he’s just the kind of guy who would know this kind of trivia, and B) he’s a huge Patrick O’Brien fan. Remember that Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander? Napoleonic maritime warfare stuff? O’Brien’s the guy that wrote that book. He knows his shite.
In the old sailing days they would have a wheel attached to the ship and a rope knotted every so far tied to a board of a certain length, then they would throw the board overboard and time it for so many seconds using a small hour glass. When the time was up they would stop the wheel, pull the rope in and count the knots. It was approximately the same set up on each ship, an approximate measurement of speed across the water. This could vary, depending upon how clean the hull of the boat was, how many sails were down, how hard the wind was blowing, if you wet the sails slightly they catch just a little more wind and the ship would go a little faster. So twenty knots in sailing days was a very relative term, until the advent of modern clocks and taking precise measurements of where the ship is and figuring an average of how far it went over a particular period of time the knot has really firmed up as a nautical measurement over time.
Pretty cool, eh? Tom’s full of stuff like this. Because of him I also know the basis for the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
Yup.
Mr. Wizard ain’t got nothin on this guy.
Filed under: Uncategorized
