Weighing The World C

Questions about the earth's true shape and dimension plagued everyone, especially scientists and soldiers, during the Age of Reason, and adventurous expeditions... » 

Questions about the earth's true shape and dimension plagued everyone, especially scientists and soldiers, during the Age of Reason, and adventurous expeditions were often dispatched to measure and triangulate a way to the truth. A surveyor himself, Danson previously regaled readers with the history of the Mason-Dixon Line (Drawing the Line, 2001), and Mason and Dixon briefly reappear in these annals as well. Danson reaches back a century before their survey, to the 1660s, when scientific surveying was incubating at France's l'Academie Royale des Sciences. Providing considerable technical detail about problems confronting savants such as Cassini, Danson does not neglect the road-trip aspect of the cavalcades organized to tackle them. He covers the French dominance of surveying up to the mid-1700s, which featured such epics as the 1735 survey of the length of longitude in the Andes, then naturally shifts to British ascendance in the century's second half. With biographical sketches of the French and British organizers, Danson enlivens data about geodetic surveying, transforming them into greatly interesting dramas of science. «