Distance Tables – A History Lesson

I was recently weeding out my bookcase to make room for my more recent acquisitions and came across this rather dog-eared copy of the BP World-Wide Marine Distance Tables and thought I'd share this especially for the youthful members of this industry who maybe never considered that distance tables were at one time in paper form.

This edition goes back to my days as a Ship Operator with BP, and I suspect I took this home when we were issued with a new edition of tables in the office. A useful item for those 'weekend duties' we had to cover with pagers before the advent of mobile phones – but that's another story!

For a full history check out the AtoBviaC website and I reckon this copy predates the example on their page as it's just one volume.

How did they work?

You can see by this picture that the world was divided into six tables each with several connecting points to be able to move between the areas.

Using Table 2 as an example you may be able to make out that one of the waypoints is Europa Point so you would be able to get the distance from say Stockholm to Europa Point then go to Table 3 covering the Mediterranean and add Europa Point to say Augusta — add the two together and you get the distance from Stockholm to Augusta.

This is a page from Table 2 where you can see how to pick the distances, noting that distances to Europa Point are on the top line.

Imagine how many tables and connecting points you have to work through to get a distance from somewhere in North West Europe to Japan!

Now you can get these distances at a click of a mouse — you youngsters have it so easy!

A note from Phil

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