Edward Wright , born in 1558, † in 1615, is one of the most famous English cartographers of the beginning of the XVIIe century. It gave a first mathematical method to form the groundwork of Mercator.

Biography

Wright studied with Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge) where it obtained a license (1581) then a control are arts (1584). He taught in this same university until 1600, except for a forwarding with the the Azores in which he took part at the request of the Count of Cumberland (England) in 1589. It is this forwarding, destiny to actually intercept a Spanish convoy of return of America which determined it, seems it, to calculate the tables loxodromic in a more precise way.

In 1600, Wright is established in London and collaborated with William Gilbert in the drafting of the Of magnete , delivers in which the Earth was compared with gigantic liking. He proposed a project to bring water by a channel since Uxbridge to the royal palace. He obtained the load of tutor of Prince de Galles Henry little before 1610, and made manufacture for his pupil a mechanical sphere giving day after day the position of the Sun and the Moon by a mechanism of clock industry.

He was engaged by the East India Company as nautical instructor in 1614, but died the following year.

Works

The principal claim to fame of Wright is to have, in its book Certaine errors off navigation corrected (1599), identified the main difficulties of the location at sea at the end of XVIe century, and to have shown that a mathematical approach made it possible to cure it. It showed in particular that navigation under the high latitudes ran up against inaccurate tables of the arcs of meridian lines under the high latitudes (beyond 45°), like against the difference between the magnetic pole and the geographical pole. It indicated how to precisely calculate the length of the arcs of meridian lines in the Projection of Mercator, by comparing this length of arc to a finished sum of terms. This calculation made it possible by là-même mathematically to build a chart in conformity, which Gerardus Mercator itself had done only in an approached way, by a drawing gradually.

As the lengths of arc of meridian line are actually the Logarithme S of the tangent of the arcs in question, one allotted about 1660 to Wright the paternity of the invention of the logarithms. However, this idea was abandoned since 1676 following the opinion of Royal Society.

Wright was very well informed of the searchs for Stevin and made publish its translation of the treaty De Havenvinding under the title of The haven-finding arte the same year as the original version (1599).

• The voiage off the right honourable George Erl off Cumberland to the Azores (1589), London. Réimpr. by Principal Hakluyt in navigations, voiages, adulterate and discoveries off the English Nation , vol. 2 (London, 1598-1600)
• Certaine errors off navigation corrected (1599, 2nd ED. 1610), London
• The haven-finding arte (1599), London

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