and it won awards from various organizations for its technology as being simple, rugged, inexpensive, reliable and accurate and was used by surveyors from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. In 1851, he exhibited his latest version at the Great Exhibition World's Fair in London. There it was examined and endorsed by scholar John Herschel. Burt received a prize from the fair for his compass instrument design. He then received another medal for his simpler, more accurate version by jurors of Astronomical Instruments with a personal compliment by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, on October 15, 1851, at Hyde Park, London, England. This instrument was invented to get away from the highly variable and unreliable readings given by the common compass of the day in a locality with a magnetic field anomaly caused by large iron ore deposits. The instrument was found to be so accurate that it was specified by the United States government for surveying public lands, state boundaries, and railroad routes. Burt's instrument was used to survey 75 per cent of the public lands of the United States, consisting of nearly a billion acres. It had saved the government millions of dollars because of its general inexpensive price tag and the accuracy of the survey. It surveyed mineral lands in many states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Colorado. Its project expenditure to survey a section of land was only a fraction of what it used to cost before his invention. An example of comparison was the boundary line between Iowa and Minnesota that was surveyed before at with the use of the old-fashioned instruments, while with Burt's solar compass it was only . See also References Sources Burt, John, History of Solar Compass Invented by William A. Burt (1878). Kuno Gross The Bagnold sun-compass, history and utilization Books on demand 2011 Further reading R. A. Bagnold and W. J. Harding King, "Journeys in the Libyan Desert 1929 and 1930", The Geographical Journal, Vol. 78, No. 6 (Dec., 1931), pp. 524, 526–535 Tuttle, Charles Richard, General History of the state of Michigan with biographical sketches, R. D. S. Tyler & Co., Detroit Free Press Company, 1873 W. B. Kennedy Shaw, "Desert Navigation: Some Experiences of the Long Range Desert Group", The Geographical Journal, V.102, Number 5, 1943, pp. 253–258 Published by The Royal Geographical Society American inventions Navigational equipment Orientation (geometry)