Why does boats measure speed in knots and not mph/kmh?
In: Physics
Think about the old days. You don’t have a speedometer. There are no landmarks on the sea to figure out your speed. Yes, the waves, but the wind can be blowing them. How can you tell how fast you are?
The solution? Create your own landmarks. You do this with a long rope, with knots tied into it at fixed intervals. You lay the rope down floating on the water, then see how long it takes your ship to pass the next knot.
Then you measure your speed in knots. “My ship was going 8 knots”. Which means you passed a knot in just 1/8 of an hour.
Now we do have speedometers and the like the but the old knots lived on because of A) tradition and B) it’s just as useful as “kilometers per hour” and is a lot faster to say.
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