Next message: Frank Reed: "Re: Simple celestial navigation in 1897"
> I came across this by chance while prowling the Internet. "The
> Battenberg Course Indicator was invented in 1892 by Captain H. S. H.
> Prince Louis of Battenberg, G.C.B., afterwards Admiral-of-the-Fleet The
At that same site there's a short bio on the inventor, Battenberg. He
was Austrian by birth, which didn't prevent him from having a highly
distinguished career in the Royal Navy. That is, until the outbreak of
war in 1914. Later he took the surname Mountbatten.
http://www.gwpda.org/bio/b/batnburg.html
Getting back to the device itself, I found that The National Maritime
Museum in London has one:
http://www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/conMediaFile.6192/Battenbergs-course-indicator-Mark-III.html
So does the Smithsonian:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/navigation/object.cfm?recordnumber=1087634
According to that page, list member Peter Ifland did a writeup on the
Course Indicator in Navigation News back in 2000.
Here's one for sale, price 475 Euros. Either this one is a different
variant, or there's a lot of stuff missing.
http://www.regiozeist.nl/eng_scheeps_instrumenten.htm
