Surely when you read the technical characteristics of the boat you are traveling in, you will have seen that… cruising speed, knots, miles per hour… and you will be making a mess. PIn order for you to pass for an expert sailor or at least for a curious or curious of the things of the sea in your next dinner with the captain, I will give you some marine notions.
In a fast plan, the Knot is a unit of speed that is equal to 1852 meters per hour, which is the same as one nautical mile. And a nautical mile is a measure of distance.
The nautical mile was adopted by international convention to simplify the conversion calculations between angles and distances. These 1852 meters correspond, more or less, to the length of an arc of one minute of terrestrial latitude.
And now I will tell you where that comes from measuring the speed of a ship in knots. Well en the XNUMXth century, a method was introduced to estimate the speed of a ship thanks to an instrument called a slide or nacelle slide.
The method consisted of a wooden plate, in the shape of an arc and with a weight at one end to which a long thin rope was tied with different knots distributed in equidistant spaces. A sailor threw the wood into the water along with the rope dragging and another used an hourglass to measure the number of knots that ran in a given interval of time. A) Yes The speed of the ship was measured, and the number of knots it traveled in that given time was said.
Some time has passed since then and much progress has been made in measuring devices, but it has been standardized, as I told you before one knot traveled is equivalent to one nautical mile per hour, which in turn is equivalent to 1,852 km / h.
And now you can know how fast you are moving, 😉