Some believe this relatively modern invention was first created for fortune-telling and "geomancy." It was only later that it was adapted for navigational purposes. The earliest compasses similar to those we use today were most likely invented by the Chinese around 200 BC.
Earlier forms of the compass were made of lodestone, which is a naturally-occurring form of the mineral magnetite. Evidence suggests that civilizations may have also used lodestones for similar purposes as early as the sixth century BCE. At some point, possibly around 1050 AD, people began suspending the lodestones so they could move freely and use them for navigation.
A description of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in a European book written in 1190 AD, so by that time, it is likely that the use of a needle as a compass was commonplace.
Who is the Greatest Teacher in History?
Aristotle, an ancient Greek who knew a few things about education, once made an observation sure to rankle some members of the PTA. He said that “those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” In other words, parents just make babies. It’s teachers who turn them into people.
Aristotle may have lived a long time ago in a different land, but his slightly acerbic exaggeration still has a ring of truth to it. Good teachers still play a significant role in making us who we are. The teachers who shape us may not always be standing at the head of a classroom (including, of course, our parents), but wherever they’re found, they are doing something that no one else can do: changing our view of the world and making us into something better than we were before.
Many parents have probably felt at one time or another that one of their child’s teachers was a “miracle worker,” a teacher who somehow gets results where other teachers have failed. Although the idea of a miracle worker has entered common parlance, the phrase was coined by Mark Twain to describe one particular person. In fact, the term has become almost synonymous with her name. That person is Anne Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller.
A mere 20 years old when first employed to school the deaf and blind Helen in 1887, Anne Sullivan herself was blind for much of the first part of her life. Educated at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Sullivan had recovered part of her eyesight by the time she traveled to Alabama to begin her job as Helen Keller’s governess. Undoubtedly, Sullivan’s own partial blindness gave her insight (in the fullest meaning of the word) into the little girl’s closed-off world.
As the 1957 play The Miracle Worker so effectively dramatized it, Sullivan’s breakthrough with Keller came as she spelled words out on her open palm to make her understand that things had words attached to them.
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