A further review of the article [1] I mentioned yesterday, (Dr. Tatum on the Coriolis effect as a navigational aid for birds), turned up a very interesting reference to Arthur Compton of Compton scattering fame (picture 1)! It turns out that Compton built an apparatus in 1915 at Wooster University, (now Wooster College) that accurately measured the rotation speed of the Earth allowing Compton to determine the length of a day, his latitude and longitude all without any astronomical references. It was a sort of Foucault pendulum constructed with a tube of water. To read all about Compton's apparatus and method in Scientific American, go to [5]: http://books.google.com/books?id=3AoiAQAAMAAJ&vq=compton%202047&num=13&pg=PA196#v=onepage&q&f=false or in the blog version of this post, just scroll to the bottom of the post for an embedded version of the article. Picture 2, below, shows a simplified version of Compton's apparatus sitting directly on the a