Product Description

Bestselling author Amir Aczel's fascinating story of the invention that liberated long-distance voyaging and changed the world forever. The story of the compass is shrouded in myth but has its roots in ancient China around 2,000 years ago where a mysterious lodestone, whose power affected metal, was used in the art of feng shui. It may have taken 1,200 years for the 'compass' to migrate to Medieval Italy, but it didn't take long for those mariners of the Amalfi coast to kickstart the Age of Discovery. The compass made it all possible, and this is its fascinating story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #753529 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"A compulsively readable investigation, as attracting as magnetic north." -Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews

The Device Is Much More Reliable Than Its History
Mr. Aczel has written a good-natured narrative that attempts to assemble some form of history of the compass that bears even the lightest scrutiny. "The Riddle Of The Compass", borders at times on humorous as the author takes us to the small Italian port that proudly displays the inventor of the compass larger than life in statue form. This is all fine for the tourist trade but the man who is immortalized in stone, upon examination, becomes a bit suspect. For the truth is, the name on the statue is not one that can be found, the statue bears the likeness of a man that no one even claims to have seen at any point in the last 6 centuries, and when examined at all it becomes readily apparent that the statue is as accurate as the idea that "Flavio Gioia" had anything to do with the invention of the compass. And so begins, "The Riddle Of The Compass", by Amir D. Aczel.

The only issue that is not in dispute is that the compass is one of the pivotal inventions that man created. While navigation of the seas had been taking place for centuries with no such device, the compass not only greatly expanded the amount of travel that could take place, but also the efficiency and the safety with which it was undertaken. International trade, exploration, and the building of empires all were facilitated by the device that appears to have been first discovered in China. The book speculates as to how the physical appearance of the compass developed, how the wind rosettes evolved, and how the compass was physically spread across the globe. Even with the high probability of China as the origin, the author allows that the discovery may have taken place more than once and in ignorance of any other's invention.

The book also has an autobiographical aspect that is nearly as interesting as the primary subject. As a young man Mr. Aczel had experiences onboard ships that would make any insurance company blanche, however they make for great reading. Overall the book is a fun read, if not as involving as his previous works like, "Fermat's Last Theorem" or "God's Equation..."

A book in need of a compass of its own
In recent years, it's become fashionable for writers to "discover" a single tiny event that became the catalyst that produced the modern world; thus, Aczel asserts the compass was "the invention that changed the world."

Sure, and the Irish saved civilization, spacemen crashed at Roswell and when a butterfly flaps its wings in Rio de Janeiro it launches a hurricane that devastates Miami.

It's an old idea, nicely expressed by George Herbert (1593-1633) when he wrote, "For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost . . . ." and thus the battle and the kingdom. It's the ultimate expression of personal ego, the belief that some tiny action of mine may change the whole course of history. (If the compass was one such example, then what might this book review accomplish ?)

Sadly, Azcel doesn't prove his point. He stumbles erratically through history, citing numerous interesting events without ever explaining why one invention suddenly prompted Europeans to build great fleets of merchant ships. Compass or not, no one can trade without having something to trade. Europe, at the time the compass was discovered by Europeans, was on the verge of a commercial explosion.

For a modern example, look at the Internet. It's based on transistors; the basic function of the transistor was evident at the turn of the century when a "cat's whisker" was used on a piece of galena to pick up the earliest radio signals. So, do we say the "crystal radio" was the spark that produced today's computers ? Likewise, Xerox in its Palo Alto Research Center invented many of the components of modern personal computers -- but it took a variety of other companies to develop these ideas into actual hardware.

The idea of the compass had been around for a long time; the sudden commercial expansion of Europe put a premium on every innovation that would facilitate and expand trade. The compass was one such invention; likewise, shipbuilding, banking, the legal system, many things changed dramatically to meet the new needs. The compass was like modern Global Positioning Satellites -- a great idea forecast by Arthur C. Clarke in 1946 but which didn't come into use until the 1990s -- a lot of other factors helped make satellites a reality. Clarke foresaw the potential of satellites; thousands of other contributors made them a practical reality.

With or without Clarke, we'd still have satellites; without the thousands of other contributors, they would never have been developed. Aczel misses this element of invention, that it is driven by the needs of society rather than by the idle curiosity of clever people who have nothing better to do with their time.

"Look folks, I've invented the compass," Aczel would have you believe that Flavio Gioia told the sailors of Amalfi in AD 1302. In response, they replied, "Okay, let's have a commercial explosion and start trading throughout the Mediterranean."

Not really, eh folks ? The airplane didn't invent modern globalization, it simply made it easier. Likewise, 700 years ago, the compass made it much easier and safer for Europeans to do something they already wanted to do. That's why it remained European technology for so long -- other societies didn't have similar incentives, and thus didn't need these sophisticated technologies.

Had Aczel broadened the scope of his basic idea, his book would have been immeasurably better. He started with a good topic, but couldn't see beyond the limits of his own compass dial. He forgot that every now and then the helmsman needs to lift his eyes from the compass to make sure that an iceberg, another ship or a shoreline isn't looming dead ahead. Or, as the mate on a ship told me when I was a helmsman on a ship crossing the North Atlantic, "Keep an eye out for the Azores, we don't want to run into them."

Likewise, Azcel should have looked around. His book is a good idea that is limited by a lack of logical context. He needed a compass himself to give this book the direction it is otherwise lacking.

A small book -- even with the padding
This small book makes one small point -- that the compass originated in China, but was exploited for navigation centuries later by Europeans. I was disappointed that there were no photographs of ancient compasses, and that the occasional drawings and maps were very small. The text is spaced out, and there is much padding and repetition (how many times do we have to be told the Italian for compass?), while opportunities for more real content were missed. For example, if the compass enabled navigators to use dead reckoning to calculate position, how was it actually done? How did they measure their speed? Aczel often mentions the importance of increasingly accurate maps, but never explains how the compass helps make better maps. What was the role of the compass on land? What happened between the Renaissance and the invention of the gyrocompass and Global Positioning System? I was frustrated by the shortcomings of this book, although it is fine for a fast read on a slow train. Aczel is a skilful writer who would benefit from a good kicking by a competent editor.