What makes nautical miles even more useful is when you're on the water and using a navigation chart, the vertical edges of the chart have the minutes of latitude. You use a 2-arm compass (not a magnetic compass) and spread the arms until one point is one your location and the other is on the destination. You then simply place the points on the vertical edge of the chart and count the minutes of latitude and that's your distance in nautical miles.

I have been sailing boats since I was a child. I still remember when I first understood how nautical miles work, and how useful it is as a unit of measure. I learned to navigate on paper charts, and I still prefer to do so, rather than using a GPS plotter. It gives me a kind of situational awareness that I can't get from a little led display. The relationship between distance, time and speed is easy to calculate, and super well adapted for a sailing vessels that move in the ranges of 0-10 knots

I actually love this video. Your understanding of sophisticated storytelling, simple visuals and effortless editing literally made me say out loud, "I love this video," to myself. I hope reading that makes you smile mate.

Bro this channel is going to grow! The concept, the topics, the little brother on the background😂 well done guys

I like this as a former U.S. navy quartermaster (navigation for you land types), but also as a native Hawaiian, to show that while the Europeans were skirting the land, the Polynesians were masters of the pacific making it look like a puddle more than the largest expanse of the time.

Wonderfully presented information! I always wondered what the difference was between the two measurements. Now I know, thanks!

Nautical miles, and their related speed measurement knots - nautical miles per hour - are so deeply entrenched in worldwide marine and aviation use, they easily survived the conversion to the metric system.

This is awesome. The narration/presentation style is rad and the content is super interesting.

The thumbnail going straight into the video was absolutely magical!

Queen Isabella was a ruling queen in her homeland, Castille. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragorn was political uniting the two largest kingdoms within "Spain", and the marriage document specified they would be joint rulers of their joined lands. But the diplomats, courtiers, and anyone else in court treated her as just a figurehead, just another queen for children. This drove her nuts. Part of the reason she funded Columbus was, if he succeeded, her status would rise astronomically. Fascinating woman. The stories that she sold her royal jewels to finance Columbus, is only a metaphor

GREAT work!! GREAT work!! Now I know what a Nautical Mile is, and why it is important, and all the rest of it!!! GREAT work!!

The nautical mile is pure beauty and its realization was one of the most important discoveries in history. Relating distance to time I can only imagine it was the first step in a long line of discoveries that led eventually to special relativity

Bro this video makes me want to play FTL again.

Willy Snellius got the measurment a little small,, because he was measurin near the 45th parallel,, which IS a little small as compared to the Equator. I saw his calculations printed out years ago. He did his calculations perfectly,, and then threw in a fudge factor, a guess, based upon this fore shortening when approaching the poles. His guess was also based upon a perfect sphere. Of course, it ain't. It was a good guess. I particularly loved, was impressed,, by this long winded perfect math calculation... and then he threw in a 'guess'. Thus is written good science.

Great YT content! Enjoyed it, and learned something. Production values were top notch. Mentioning Monaco as a meeting place for science, and putting up a panel with race cars is pure gold.

A nautical mile is 1/60°. aka: an arcminute. As navigation is in degrees by astro observation, (astrolabe and sextant), and degrees of latitude longitude and great circles are cited in sexagesimal divisions of degrees, the arcminute was about the smallest angle that could be typically measured. And the arcminute - an angle - was essentially renamed nautical mile. Knowing that the length in distance of arcminutes varies is a minor concern in navigation. So Brits had the most maps and the Admiralty nautical mile was rounded off to 6080 ft, close enough. And the fact that 1 nautical mile is somewhat close to a statute mile made distances easy to comprehend. Especially when making 3-4 knots in a ship. And in calculation nautical miles times 60 equals degrees. And calculation is by trig function so no need for feet meters or statute miles.

I love the way the thumbnail transitioned seamlessly into an animation. Not sure I've seen that before.

Love the Ben Prunty soundtrack in the beginning, and the "second brother" tangent made me laugh. Take my subscription!

Regarding 9:17, one nautical mile is one minute of arc length along a great circle around the earth. Since there are 360 degrees around the circumference of a sphere, 360 degrees is equivalent to 21,600 minutes of arc length which means 21,600 nautical miles. Regarding 10:13, the original definition of one meter was one ten-millionth of the arc length from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian. Therefore the circumference of the earth would be 40,000 kilometers. The length of one meter was inscribed between two marks onto a bar made of 90% platinum +10% iridium alloy and stored in Sèvres, France.

It's fun to think about the history of scientific thought; how a thought started, how it evolved, etc. So, they got the latitude (space) part right, then along came the addition of time, allowing for longitude. Such a great way to visualize Special Relativity and the concept of Space-Time. (General Relativity includes gravity)

Subscribed! Did not know I was interested in this, but you've done such a great job of presenting this information that I stayed and watched the whole thing!

I love all these origin of words. Love your crude explanation

Fun fact: The meter isn't actually 1/1000,000 of a quarter-meridian through Paris due to one of the surveyers making a mistake. To his credit, he realized it relatively soon after returning. Unfortunately by that point the Napoleonic wars had started and there wasn't really the bandwidth to re-do it, so they just went with the mistake. Later metrology conventions discussed revising the meter to actually be based on the meridian, but by that point there were too many prototype meters floating around for that to be practical. It was thus defined based on lines on a stick for many years, until Special Relativity and increasingly accurate measurement methods allowed a definition in terms of the second (defined based on the inverse frequency of the hyperfine transition of cesium) and the speed of light.

Sad I never learned this in school 50 years ago and I ended up learning this by watching TV. Thanks for finally enlightening me. Thumbs up and subscribed!

Funny, fantastic and just an all round great video thanks man !

There has always been a bit of "needle" between the Brits and the French about measurements. They hated Greenwich Mean Time being used the standard for navigation. As for the English language being the required language for the world airlines- - -

In geolocation tracking, coarse geolocation is accurate to a nautical mile (a minute of latitude) and fine geolocation is accurate to 1/60 of a nautical mile (a second of latitude).

My brain now hurts but thanks for the lesson

1.5 mins into this video and it's really visually engaging and edifying - Thanks!

For your next WTF is a [unit of measure] episode, I suggest the new (as of 2019) kilogram (which has a mass within a couple ppb of the previous kilogram). It's interesting how much cutting-edge science and technology makes an appearance in realizing the kilogram now. "Wait, it's quantum mechanics?" Yes, yes it is!

good stuff. a great presentation to describe a complex idea.

There's probably more people than ever before that "think" the Earth is flat.

Great learning experience and hilarious, Good shit.

Very interesting and informative. Would be very helpful to make captions available. Also, unless I missed it, you never say how many miles is a nautical miles, 1.15.

The Brother - Brother conversation style is a great way of doing this! Its like a podcast but I actually care.

what a fantastically explained video! I had no idea!

A story well told! And I learned something! Nice!

The first thing I thought of when I saw the title is the meme "Wtf is a kilometer?!" 😂

Fantastic video, subscribed.

Most people don’t know nautical miles is always used in aviation too

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

That transition from thumbnail to video is pretty f*ckin clever

This channel is about to blow up. Mark my words.

today i learnt something new. Thanks for sharing

Great stuff. Excellent content

Video was so good I forgot it was about nautical miles till the end.

This was absolutely great, you got a new sub

One minute of arc of latitude at the equator, or 6080.3 ft, depending on which spheroid you use. (2Pi x R)(Delta/360)To get knots, multiply miles by 1.1.

Earned my sub. Great presentation.

Excellent video, I learned a lot.

This is just a small part of the knowledge you gain in captains school. It’s cool tho. Global navigation is quite interesting.

This channel is going to become massive.

And the 1/60 of a degree is why knots are measured in time. There are 60 minutes in a degree and 60 second in a minte and we measure the length of travel by measuring the time and speed using a log line that was a rope with knots tied in it at certain intervals. It was dropped with a wood end for drag and as it was released behind the ship the number of knots on the line that fed out where counted over a specific time which gaveyour speed in knots. And with the knot speed known you could use that speed with the time and know your distance traveled and thats why a latitude line was one degree, and that degree is 60 minutes and broke down to a smaller measurement of 60 seconds. The reason it was broken down from the 360 to the 1/60th is because of 60 minutes in an hour and the earth rotating at 24hours. So lat and long is measured in degrees minutes and seconds. So if you go north at 15 knots you will go one degree in 4 hours. And if you go 15 knots in say 1 hour and 15 seconds you can narrow that down to a specific point. Measurement on a nautical chart is only made using latitude lined because the degrees stay at a constant where longitude line degrees get smaller from the equator the further north or south you go.

Excellent video

OOHHHHHHH THE THUMBNAIL TRANSITION IS SO CLEAN HOLYYYYYY

I’m not a sailor, but I am an aviator. Pilots flight plan and navigate using nautical miles. I never really understood why until I saw this video.

That was great. Good job.

Great video!

did I hear the sounds the boats make in anno? nice! Also good choice of music!

This is a really awesome quality video

Columbus initially went west after convincing the Spanish monarchs it was an alternate route to India and China (for those spices), so they bankrolled his expedition. Not because he was discovering new lands for them. And that's why it's still called the 'West Indies'.

I am happy I found this video. Instant sub.

A good video AND the FTL Faster than Light soundtrack? le chef kiss

Very good channel and video

what a underrated channel

The Roman mile was way shorter than the modern mile. In fact, even in Rome it was 1000 soldier's paces long only in theory. The "pace" was defined by them as 5ft which seems to be a lot longer than a real pace of an average soldier, and the 5ft pace was (if ever) probably only attainable over shorter very fast marches. I guess there had to be good propaganda value in presenting your army as having extraordinary abilities, but 1000 paces on an all-day long march was likely to be closer to a kilometer than the 1.4km of the officially defined mile. But, because the definition was based in a variable human action, it was easy for a commander to claim they had marched 100 miles because he was measuring the number of paces, but the actual distance traveled could have been much less. In the Middle Ages various kings played the game of my mile is bigger than yours and so it grew to the current 1.6km length, and the Roman practice of dividing into 1000 yards became 1760 yards for no logical reason. We can blame Medieval Christians for the current illogical mile definition rather than the Romans.

thanks for the history lesson.

Well done, guys. You just earned a sub. If DiscipeDojo had half your editing skills our channel would have exponentially more subscribers. :)

I've read the Apollo missions used three different measurement systems. Imperial for launch operations, Nautical for the trip to the moon and orbital operations, and metric for the lunar surface.

Hey alittle bit of a correction or I suppose re-correction. At 4:35 you indeed said correctly the first time that the higher the Sun is at noon, the closer you are to the equator. However, the picture in question shows us position calculated by the angle of POLARIS over the horizon, also known as the North Star. Calculating your latitude from the Polaris would infact be the reverse compared to calculating the latitude from the Sun's position due to the fact that Polaris is almost perfectly aligned with Earth's Northern axis of rotation. As in, when the Polaris is closer to the horizon, the closer you are to the equator. Ofcourse you couldn't use this technique on the southern hemisphere of the Earth, as the Earth itself would block the star. This is why on the southern hemisphere, part from measuring your latitude in relation to the sun, you'd use the Southern Cross constallation, which is a little less convinient way of measuring the latitude, and needs more calculating whn the constallation isn't at it's highest point on the sky. Other than that little hitch, what an excellent video! :)

I remember studying navigation to acquire my charter licence. There was no gps in the 70s and I had to learn dead reckoning which involves a good compass and knowing one's speed. I also learned how to use a sextant which I used often just to practice. It isn't that hard actually. 1.15 mph= knot or nautical mile.

Glad you found a good cacio e pepe video to use in the pepper section of this video 🤣

Finally someone that doesn’t sound scripted! Plus I learned something new

“You can do this at home, if you want to. Just climb to the top of a tall building and calculate the circumference of the earth.” Sure! Hold your breath, I’ll be right back!☝️

Speaking to the 1000 paces, our "English" mile would be a pace of about 5 feet 4 inches, quite a long stride unless the Romans meant each placement of the right or left foot; what we would consider 2 paces...

Freakin awsome job thanks.

Fact: 1 Scandinavian mile (Mil) is equal to 10 kilometers, it is used in Sweden and Norway. Denmark abandoned it though 😭

A nautical mile is an arc minute on the equator. 40.000 km / 21.600 = 1,852 km

People think that medieval working class food was bland -- and it was, to our palate. But local spices were available. Garlic was considered vulgar by the upper class at one point because it is so common. To them it was fine because palates are relative. Spices were just yet another way for rich people to show off.

Upvoted for FTL soundtrack

Great upload, thanks. Very much related: I recommend the book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. It's a great, brief, fascinating history tale primarily about the tricky issue of determining latitude at sea

My man, you left some stuff out. 1. A nautical mile is about 2000 yards or 6000 feet. 2. A "Knot" is a measurement of speed, was based on the 2000 yard/6000ft nautical mile. 3. How a "knot" came to be a measurement of speed. 4. Understanding dead reckoning (Time/Speed/Distance).

No idea how you got into my recommendations, but i like the style 😊

I once worked at a subway and a got prank called. I went along with it. They asked how long was our footlongs... i responded in inches, feet, millimeters, lightyears, and nuatical miles. 😂

Thanks bro!

Can someone please tell me whats the name of the song with the guitars and violins?!?!? Near the beginning, its so familiar yet I have no idea where I've heard it!!!

I didn't know this French developed measurement replaced the one sixtieth of a degree standard. A Nautical mile is 6078 feet or one minute of arc of the Earth's circumference . A Statute mile is 5280.

A knot or nautical mile is one minute of arc from pole to pole. Pole to pole = 180 degrees. 180 ×60= 10,800 10,800 nautical miles from pole to pole . One NM has been standardised to 1,852 metres.

Fascinating! But you kinda missed "what is a knot"? The deal with a nautical mile being a geodesic with an arc that spans one minute of angle ( 1/60 of a degree). But what good is that? Well if you are on a ship and take a piece of a log or stick and throw it overboard with a string attached and a knot in the strong every 47 feet, then count how many knots pass out in 28 seconds the result is nautical miles per hour, or knots. You then pulled the log back in and entered the value in the ship's notebook along with the weather and any interesting items. This is the 'log' entry and the notebook came to be known as the ship's log. You need a clock or egg-timer type little hourglass or something for the time. And the speed is speed through the water and does not account for currents, etc. Like air speed versus ground speed. And thus a nautical mile is one minute of arc on the Earth's surface. And a knot is one nautical mile per hour. The funny thing is naut and knot are not related etymologically. Ship speed is deceiving because it travels day and night. A ship that only goes 6 miles per hours still travels 144 miles per day.

I love you legitimately surprised you were to see the phoenecian trade routes, oscar here you come. 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Wonderful video ! At minute 9:41 what 3d tool is are you using?

Loved the video, now tell is what a knot is

Very good question

Thanks for making me want to go sink more of my life into FTL

WTF!? Your channel carries itself like it has at least 2 million subs, but you dont even have 7000 yet!? Lets fix this now!❤

And, if you were a lookout during your time is the U.S. Navy, you were told a nautical mile was 2,000 yards.

10:34 They don't seem to have read the whole thing: the cable lentgh is supposed to be 1/10th of a nautical mile, i.e. 185.2 metres. But in the Royal Navy it's 608 feet, or 185.3 metres, and in the US Navy, 120 fathoms, or 219.5 metres.

So, how far is it from the north pole to Pittsburgh Pa. I need to know because I'm thinking of applying for work at Santa's workshop, and I might have to commute.

Props to the usage of FTL music, love that game

Is the faster than light game music your using open source?