Is the Mariner's Compass a Chinese Invention?

Abstract

A WRITER in the North China Herald of Shanghai devotes a learned article to detailing and discussing the facts regarding the claim of the Chinese to have invented the mariner's compass. They did not learn the properties of the magnetized needle from any other country. They found it out for themselves, though it is impossible to point to the man by name who first observed that a magnetized needle points north and south. He suggests that it came about in this way. The Chinese have in their country boundless tracts of ironstone, and among these no small portion is magnetic. Every woman needs a needle, and iron early took the place of the old stone needles, and were commonly used before the time of Ch'in Shih-huang—that is, more than twenty-one centuries ago. Whenever a needle happened to be made of magnetic iron, it might reveal its quality by falling into a cup of water, when it happened to be attached to a splinter of wood, for example. It came in some such way to be known commonly that certain needles had this quality. The great producing centre for magnetic iron is T'szchou, in Southern Chihli. This city was very early called the City of Mercy, and the magnetic stone produced there came to be known as the stone of T'szchou, and so t'szshih became the ordinary name for a magnet. Later, the Chinese began to speak of the City as the “City of the Magnet,” instead of calling it the “City of Mercy.” The polarity of the magnetic needle would become known to the Chinese of that city and its neighbourhood first. The first who noticed the polarity would be some intelligent person who communicated the fact as an unaccountable peculiarity in an age when omens and portents were diligently sought for in every natural object and phenomenon.