Weighing the World: The Quest to Measure the Earth - Softcover

Danson, Edwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195384954 ISBN 13: 9780195384956

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

At the start of the 18th century there were no maps, anywhere in the world. No one knew, with any certainty, the shape of the earth or what lay beneath its surface. Was it hollow or solid? Were the Andes the highest mountains on the Earth or was it the peak of Tenerife? Was the Earth a perfect sphere or slightly squashed as Sir Isaac Newton prophesized? In Weighing the World, master-surveyor and bestselling author Edwin Danson presents the stories of the scientists and scholars who cut their way through jungles, crossed the artic tundra, and braved the world's highest mountains to discover the truth about our Earth. Danson also recounts the extraordinary experiment, conducted on a desolate Scottish peak by Astromer Royal Neville Maskelyne, to understand the so-called "attraction of mountains," the curious capability mountians have to bend gravity, without which it would be impossible to accurately map Earth's surface. A spell-binding scientific adventure story, Weighing the World will intrigue anyone curious about the shape of our planet and how we have come to know it.

About this title

About the Author:

Edwin Danson is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors. He is the author of Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America.

From Booklist:

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. Gilbert Taylor
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About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0195384954
• ISBN 13: 9780195384956
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304