Rule is a leading global manufacturer of nautical compasses under the Danforth brand. When it comes to streamlining production processes and building a better product, Rule employees aren’t dealing solely with the everyday issues of improving equipment or processes. Instead, they’re wrestling with the forces of nature.

Amazingly, this past year, they came out on top — developing a compass that outsmarts Mother Nature and works perfectly everywhere in the world.

Global balance has always been an elusive goal in the compass industry. The earth has six magnetic zones, each pulling down on the compass magnet in a different way. A compass that works in the North Atlantic is difficult to read, inaccurate or even inoperable in the South Pacific.

To compensate, compass makers must spend valuable time and money “special balancing” each compass in a Helmholtz Coil set to a specific magnetic zone. Their stock rooms are filled with multiple versions of each compass line for customers in different geographies.

Rule broke free of this trap by breaking the rules. Questioning the most basic tenets of compass design, a team led by engineers Bruce Wilkinson, Scott Batchelder, and Jim Burrill elected to decouple the compass card from the magnet.

“It was a counterintuitive idea, but we were determined to find a solution because we knew the payoff would be so huge for us and our customers,” says Product Manager Ken LeBlanc.

The result is GLOBALBalanceTM card system, which allows compasses to stay in balance no matter where a boat is sailing. This breakthrough is huge news in the boating industry, where word spread quickly that Rule had taken on the earth’s unrelenting magnetic forces — and won.