Why Is ‘Knot’ Used as a Speed ​​Unit in Maritime?

When most of us think of speedometer, mileage comes to mind. Because it is used as a unit of speed or distance in our daily life. We use kilometers. For example, the speedometer of our cars is shown as km/h.

Well, since we use a familiar measurement system such as kilometers in our vehicles, when it comes to the sea Why is “knot” used as a unit of speed? Let’s take a closer look at where the “knot” speed unit comes from.

Knot speed measurement came to the rescue of sailors in the 15th century.

Until the 1600s, sailors were sailing without knowing their speed. This situation naturally brought many problems with it. As a solution to this issue, a tool was developed. “Log” They now knew how fast they could travel, thanks to this tool.

The knot speed unit was developed with the tool called Longline.

This tool originally consisted of a rope and an hourglass attached to a triangular piece of wood. sailors They were taking a triangular piece of wood and tying a rope to its end. Afterwards, they tied knots on this rope at equal intervals (14.4 meters).

Afterwards, they threw the piece of wood into the water from the back of the ship and kept time with an hourglass. In this process, which usually takes 30 seconds, it is placed on the rope at equal intervals. They counted the knots they tied. This process was repeated several times and the average velocity was calculated.

Each node reported 1 knot per hour.

With this method the sailors foundIt was understood that if 10 knots of the rope were in the water, they were traveling at 10 knots. In other words, every node here showed us that the ship was traveling at a speed of 1852 meters per hour. “Knot”, which is already an English word, means knot in Turkish. At this point, 1 knot means that a distance of 1 knot per hour has been traveled.

What technologies are used today to calculate the speed of ships?

In the 1990s, it was also used for civilian use. GPS After the technology, many ships switched to this system. GPS determines the position of the ship via different satellites and calculates the distance it moves in a short time. With this ultrasonic sensors or Doppler measurement It is also among the methods used to determine the speed of the ship.