Who Invented The Compass?

The compass has been an important navigational tool for travelers both on land and sea for hundreds of years. While most people today tend to use even more advanced electronic gadgets such as GPS to guide their trips on the open ocean, the compass was once a standard of navigation technology that no sailor or mariner would dare leave on a voyage without. 

 

The ancient Chinese are accredited with the invention of the compass and many other scientific tools that are still in use today. The Chinese originally developed the compass as a tool for helping Feng Shui practitioners to align their lives with the forces of the Earth, which were later discovered to be the magnetic poles. This form of the compass, not yet used for navigational purposes, first appeared in the 2nd – 3rd centuries. These early devices used a lodestone spoon set on top of a smooth surface where markings indicated the four cardinal directions. Lodestones are made of a magnetic iron mineral and point north as a result of the Earth’s magnetic field.

 

Eventually, it was discovered that this tool could be used to aid navigation as well, and compasses with needles used primarily for navigation appeared from the years 850 to 1050. The first recorded use of a compass as a navigational tool was by Zheng He, a Chinese mariner who used it on seven different voyages from 1405 to 1433.

 

Though historians cannot determine who originally invented the compass, we know that it is one of many ingenious inventions that came from ancient China. The compass has changed in many ways since its original form, and now many navigating instruments utilize digital compasses that read the Earth’s magnetic fields and point travelers in the right direction. Despite its apparent simplicity, the compass has been one of the most important navigation tools for mariners for hundreds of years.