This was a matter of peculiar gratification to Airy, who had
always maintained that the method of Tables of Errors, which had been
so persistently adhered to by the Admiralty, was a mistake, and that
sooner or later they would find it necessary to adopt his method of
mechanical correction. The passage referred to is as follows: "The
name of Sir George Airy, the father of the mechanical compensation of
the compass in iron vessels, having just been mentioned, it may not be
inappropriate to remind you that the present year is the fiftieth
since Sir George Airy presented to the Royal Society his celebrated
paper on this subject with the account of his experiments on the
'Rainbow' and 'Ironsides.' Fifty years is a long period in one man's
history, and Sir George Airy may well be proud in looking back over
this period to see how complete has been the success of his compass
investigation. His mode of compensation has been adopted by all the
civilized world. Sir William Thomson, one of the latest and perhaps
the most successful of modern compass adjusters, when he exhibited his
apparatus in 1878 before a distinguished meeting in London, remarked
that within the last ten years the application of Sir George Airy's
method had become universal, not only in the merchant service, but in
the navies of this and other countries, and added--The compass and the
binnacles before you are designed to thoroughly carry out in practical
navigation the Astronomer Royal's principles.
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