The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named

The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named

John Keay

Language: English

Pages: 226

ISBN: 0006531237

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A vivid description of one of the most ambitious scientific projects undertaken in the 19th century, and the men who undertook the measurement of the Himalayas and the mapping of the Indian subcontinent: William Lambton and George Everest. The graphic story of the measurement of a meridian, or longitudinal, arc extending from the tip of the Indian subcontinent to the mountains of the Himalayas. Much the longest such measurement hitherto made, it posed horrendous technical difficulties, made impossible physical demands on the survey parties (jungle, tigers, mountains etc.), and took over 50 years. But the scientific results were commensurate, including the discovery of the world's highest peaks and a new calculation of the curvature of the earth's surface. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 triggered a massive construction of roads, railways, telegraph lines and canals throughout India: all depended heavily on the accuracy of the maps which the Great Arc had made possible.

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Humour. Out with his gun of a dewy morning, nostrils flared to enjoy the post-monsoon freshness, the forty-four-year-old Colonel was loving every minute of it. This was the life. It was snipe for breakfast, it was tea with the Nawab, it was India in all its pre-colonial innocence. There was no better place, no better job. During 1807 the Colebrookes pushed up the Gogra and the Rapti, tributaries of the Ganges, and came within sight of the mountains. At Gorakhpur Robert took his first series of.

Less common, was more deadly, sparing neither the fit nor the feeble. And fatalities from other unspecified fevers, although scarcely mentioned in Lambton’s reports, become commonplace in Everest’s. Not untypical was the record of another survey party in Hyderabad, a counterpart to Everest’s in the Kistna-Godavari jungles, which was conducting a secondary triangulation west of the Great Arc. Under Lieutenant James Garling it had taken the field in 1816 and had made good progress. But ‘in 1819.

Salary, it was necessary to prove that in Europe, as well as recuperating, he would be busy about the Survey’s business. He therefore took with him sufficient documentation to work up the results of his last two years’ work and to write an account of it. On arrival in London he also began visiting instrument-makers and indenting for the latest in the way of survey apparatus. Besides theodolites and zenith sectors, he inspected lamps for night work and a sun-reflecting mirror, variously known as a.

Observation had been sunk deep in the ground. Everest was expected any day. ‘The evening of my arrival I shall light two large [bon]fires, for which please keep a look-out,’ he wrote to Boileau. ‘I wish you to burn a dozen blue lights at intervals of a quarter of an hour … If you see the double fires, allow half an hour to expire after their first blaze before you burn your first blue light … If you can lay down the approximate position of [Akbar’s tomb] it will assist me … I remain your most.

South to Bidar in Hyderabad had been undertaken to correct errors which might have resulted from the use of Dinwiddie’s now disgraced chain and other inferior instruments. If Everest had had his way, the entire Arc would have been revised right down to Cape Comorin. But the government had only reluctantly approved the remeasurement of the Bidar base and could see no reason for further revision in the name of inch-perfect geodesy. Lambton’s work was still good enough for all practical purposes.

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