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North, South, East, West.

These are the four cardinal directions on a compass.

Using this marvelous device, sailors have been able to

navigate treacherous waters for centuries. Boy Scouts have survived countless

wilderness hikes, and surveyors can establish a line that defines where your property ends and mine begins.

The magnetic compass is one of the four great inventions that came to us from ancient China,

along with gunpowder, paper, and printing.

The Chinese compass is incredibly useful for finding your way, but it's not perfect.

Because a standard compass points to magnetic north rather than true north as determined by the Earth's rotation,

it can misguide navigators slightly.

Worse, the steel hole of a large ship can pull a magnetic compass way off course.

When navigating a treacherous ocean voyage, an accurate compass is an absolute necessity.

The Chinese compass was good, but navigators desperately needed something better.

Fortunately for sailors, Boy Scouts, and well all of us, the compass isn't just an invention,

it's also a product.

And the product development process leads to improvements.

Through successive iterations, good products can become great ones.

In the case of the compass, a man named Herman Onshots Comp came up with a great improvement.

He invented the first gyro compass in the early 1900s and he founded a company to manufacture it and market it to navigators.

With the help of a gyroscope, the Earth's rotation and some math that would make most of our head spin, the gyro compass has helped

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