Tag: maps

Aug 25 2013

Book review: A history of the world in twelve maps by Jerry Brotton

HistoryOfTheWorldInTwelveMapsAs a fan of maps, I was happy to add A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton to my shopping basket (I bought it as part of a reduced price multi-buy deal in an actual physical book shop).

A History traces history through the medium maps, various threads are developed through the book: what did people call the things we now call maps? what were they trying to achieve with their maps? what geography was contained in the maps? what technology was used to make the maps?

I feel the need to explicitly list, and comment on, the twelve maps of the title:

1. Ptolemy’s Geography 150 AD, distinguished by the fact that it probably contained no maps. Ptolemy wrote about the geography of the known world in his time, and amongst this he collated a list of locations which could be plotted on a flat map using one of two projection algorithms. A projection method converts (or projects) the real life geography of the spherical earth onto the 2D plane of a flat map. Project methods are all compromises, it is impossible to simultaneously preserve relative directions, areas and lengths when making the 3D to 2D transformation. The limitation of the paper and printing technology to hand meant that Ptolemy was not able to realise his map. Also the relatively small size of the known world meant that projection was not a pressing problem. The Geography exists through copies created long after the original was written.

2. Al-idrisi’s Entertainment, 1154AD. The Entertainment is not just a map, it is a description of the world as it was known at the time. This was the early pinnacle in terms of the realisation of the roadmap laid out by Ptolemy. Al-Idrisi, a Muslim nobelman, made the Entertainment for a Christian Sicilian king. It draws on both Christian and Muslim sources to produce a map which will look familiar to modern eyes (except for being upside down). There is some doubt as to exactly which map was included in the Entertainment since no original intact copies exist.

3. Hereford Mappamundi, 1300AD this is the earliest original map in the book but in many ways it is a step backward in terms of the accuracy of its representation of the world. Rather than being a geography for finding places it is a religious object placing Jerusalem at the top and showing viewers scenes of pilgrimage and increasing depravity as one moves away from salvation. It follows the T-O format which was common among such mappmundi.

4. Kangnido world map, 1402AD. To Western eyes this is a map from another world: Korea, again it only exists in copies but not that distant from the original. Here we see strongly the influence of the neighbouring China. The map is about administration and bureaucracy (and contains errors thought to have been added to put potential invaders off the scent). An interesting snippet is that the Chinese saw the nonogram (a square made of 9 squares) as the perfect form – in a parallel with the Greek admiration for the circle. The map also contains elements of geomancy, which was important to the Koreans.

5. Waldseemuller world map, 1507AD. This is the first printed map, it hadn’t really struck me before but printing has a bigger impact than simply price and availability when compared to manuscripts. Printed books allow for all sorts of useful innovations such as pagination, indexes, editions and so forth which greatly facilitate scholarly learning. With manuscripts stating that something is on page 101 of you handwritten manuscript is of little use to someone else with his handwritten copy of the same original manuscript. The significance of the Waldseemuller map is that it is the first European map to name America, it applies the label to the south but it is sometimes seen as the “birth certificate” of the USA. Hence the US Library of Congress recently bought it for $10 million.

6. Diogo Ribeiro, world map, 1529AD. A map to divide the world between the Spanish and Portuguese, who had boldly signed a treaty dividing the world into two hemispheres with them to own one each. The problem arose on the far side of the world, where it wasn’t quite clear where the lucrative spice island of Moluccas lay.

7. Gerard Mercator world map, 1569AD. I wrote about Mercator a while back, in reviewing The World of Gerard Mercator by Andrew Taylor. The Mercator maps are important for several reasons, they introduce new technology in the form of copperplate rather than woodcut printing, copperplate printing enables italic script, rather than the Gothic script that is used in woodcut printing; they make use of the newly developed triangulation method of surveying (in places); the Mercator projection is one of several methods developed at the time for placing a spherical world onto a flat map – it is the one that maintained – despite limitations.And finally he brought the Atlas to the world – a book of maps.

8. Joan Blaeu Atlas maier, 1662. Blaeu was chief cartography for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and used the mapping data his position provided to produce the most extravagant atlases imaginable. They combined a wide variety of previously published maps with some new maps and extensive text. These were prestige objects purchased by wealthy merchants and politicians.

9. Cassini Family, map of France, 1793. The Cassini family held positions in the Paris Observatory for four generations, starting in the late 17th Century when the first geodesic studies were conducted, these were made to establish the shape of the earth, rather than map it’s features. I reviewed The Measure of the Earth  by Larry D. Ferriero which related some of this story. Following on from this the French started to carry systematic triangulation surveys of all of France. This was the first time the technique had been applied at such scale, and was the forbearer to the British Ordnance Survey, the origins of which are described in Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt. The map had the secondary effect of bringing together France as a nation, originally seen by the king as a route to describing his nation (and possibly taxing it), for the first time Parisian French was used to describe all of the country and each part was mapped in an identical manner.

10. The Geographical Pivot of History, Halford Mackinder, 1904. In a way the Cassini map represents the pinnacle of the technical craft of surveying. Mackinder’s intention was different, he used his map to persuade. He had long promoted the idea of geography as a topic for serious academic study and in 1904 he used his map to press his idea of central Asia as being central to the politics and battle for resources in the world. He used a map to present this idea, its aspect and details crafted to reinforce his argument.

11. The Peters Projection, 1973. Following the theme of map as almost-propaganda the Peters projection – an attempted equal-area projection – shows a developing world much larger than we are used to in the Mercator projection. Peters attracted the ire of much of the academic cartographic communities, partly because his projection is nothing new but also because he promoted it as being the perfect, objective map when, in truth it was nothing of the kind. This is sort of the point of the Peters projection, it is open to criticism but highlights that the decisions made about the technical aspects of a map have a subjective weight. Interestingly, many non-governmental organisations took to using the Peters projection because it served their purpose of emphasising the developing world.

12. Google Earth, 2012. The book finishes with a chapter on Google Earth, initially on the technical innovations required to make such a map but then moving on to the wider commercial implications. Brotton toys with the idea that Google Earth is somehow “other“ from previous maps in its commercial intent and the mystery of its methods, this seems wrong to me. A number of the earlier maps he discusses were of limited circulation and one does not get the impression that methods were shared generously. Brotton makes no mention of the Openstreetmap initiative that seems to address these concerns.

In the beginning I found the style of A History a little dry and academic but once I’d got my eye in it was relatively straightforward reading. I liked the broader subject matter, and greater depth than some of my other history of maps reading.

Jun 29 2013

Book review: Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf

ChasingVenusI’ve been reading more of adventurous science of the Age of Enlightenment, more specifically Andrea Wulf’s book Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens the scientific missions to measure the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769.

Transits occur when a planet, typically Venus, lies directly between the earth and the Sun. During a transit Venus appears as a small black disc on the face of the sun. Since it’s orbit is also inside that of earth Mercury also transits the sun. Solar eclipses are similar but in this case the obscuring body is the moon, and since it is much closer to earth it completely covers the face of the sun.

Transits of Venus occur in pairs, 8 years apart separated by 100 or so years, they are predictable astronomical events. Edmund Halley predicted the 1761/1769 pair in 1716 and in addition proposed that the right type of observation would give a measure of the distance from the earth to the Sun. Once this distance is known distances of all the other planets from the sun can be calculated. In the same way as a solar eclipse can only be observed from a limited number of places on earth, the transit of Venus can only be observed from a limited number of places on earth. The observations required are the time at which Venus starts to cross the face of the sun, ingress, and the time at which it leaves, egress. These events are separated by several hours. In order to calculate the distance to the sun observations must be made at widely separate locations.

These timings had to be globally calibrated: some one in, say, London, had to be able to convert the times measured in Tahiti to the time London. This amounts to knowing precisely where the measurement was made – it is the problem of the longitude. At this time the problem of the longitude was solved given sufficient time, for land-based locations. It was still a challenge at sea.

At the time of the 1761/69 transits globe spanning travel was no easy matter, when Captain Cook landed on Tahiti in 1769 his was only the third European vessel to have done so, other ships had arrived in the two previous years; travel to the East Indies although regular was still hazardous. Even travel to the far North of Europe was a challenge, similarly across Russia to the extremes of Siberia. Therefore much of the book is given over to stories of long, arduous travel not infrequently ending in death.

Most poignant for me was the story of Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche who managed to observe the entirety of both transits in Siberia and California but died of typhus shortly after observing the lunar eclipse critical to completing the observations he had made of Venus. His fellow Frenchman, Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil, observed the first transit onboard a ship on the way to Mauritius (his measurements were useless), remained in the area of the Indian Ocean until the second transit which he failed to observe because of the cloud cover and returned to France after 10 years, his relatives having declared him dead and the Académie des Sciences ceasing to pay him, assuming the same. Charles Green, observing for the Royal Society from Tahiti with Captain Cook and Joseph Banks, died after falling ill in Jakarta (then Batavia) after he had made his observations.

The measurements of the first transit in 1761 were plagued by uncertainty, astronomers had anticipated that they would be able to measure the times of ingress and egress with high precision but found that even observers at the same location with the same equipment measured times differing by 10s of seconds. We often see sharp, static images of the sun but viewed live through a telescope the picture is quite different; particularly close to the horizon the view of the sun the sun boils and shimmers. This is a result of thermal convection in the earth’s atmosphere, and is known as “seeing”. It’s not something I’d appreciated until I’d looked at the sun myself through a telescope. This “seeing” is what caused the problems with measuring the transit times, the disk of Venus did not cross a sharp boundary into the face of the sun, it slides slowly into a turbulent mess.

The range of calculated earth-sun distances for the 1761 measurements was 77,100,000 to 98,700,000 miles which spans the modern value of 92,960,000 miles. This represents a 22% range. By 1769 astronomers had learned from their experience, and the central estimate for the earth-sun distance by Thomas Hornsby was 93,726,000 miles, a discrepancy of less than 1% compared to the modern value. The range of the 1769 measurements was 4,000,000 miles which is only 4% of the earth-sun distance.

By the time of the second transit there was a great deal of political and public interest in the project. Catherine the Great was very keen to see Russia play a full part in the transit observations, in England George III directly supported the transit voyages and other European monarchs were equally keen.

Chasing Venus is of the same theme as a number of books I have reviewed previously: The Measure of the Earth, The Measure of All Things, Map of a Nation, and The Great Arc. The first two of these are on the measurement of the size, and to a degree, the shape of the Earth. The first in Ecuador in 1735, the second in revolutionary France. The Great Arc and Map of a Nation are the stories of the mapping by triangulation of India and Great Britain. In these books it is the travel, and difficult conditions that are the central story. The scientific tasks involved are simply explained, although challenging to conduct with accuracy at the time they were made and technically complex in practice.

There is a small error in the book which caused me initial excitement, the first transit of Venus was observed in 1639 by Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree, Horrocks being located in Hoole, Cheshire according to Wulf. Hoole, Cheshire is suburb of Chester about a mile from where I am typing this. Sadly, Wulf is wrong, Horrocks appears to have made his observations either at Carr House in Bretherton or Much Hoole (a neighbouring village) both in Lancashire and 50 miles from where I sit.

Perhaps unfairly I found this book a slightly repetitive list of difficult journeys conducted first in 1761, and then in 1769. It brought home to me the level of sacrifice for these early scientific missions, and indeed global trade, simply in the separation from ones family for extended periods but quite often in death.

May 12 2012

Book review: Measure of the Earth by Larrie D. Ferreiro

Measure-of-the-EarthThis post is a review and summary of Larrie D. Ferreiro’s book “Measure of the Earth” which describes the French Geodesic Mission to South America to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the equator. The action takes place in the 2nd quarter of the 18th century, the Mission left France in 1735 with the first of its members returning to Europe in 1744.

The book fits together with The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, which is about the later French effort to measure a meridian through Paris at the turn of the Revolution in order to define the metre, The Great Arc by John Keay on the survey of India and Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt on the triangulation survey of the United Kingdom.

The significance of the measurement was that earlier triangulation surveys of France had indicated that the earth was not spherical, as had pendulum measurements made by Jean Richer in Guyana in 1671 which showed a pendulum there ran 2:28 slower there than in Paris. A Newtonian faction believed that the earth was flattened at the poles, its rotation having led to a bulging at the equator. A Cartesian school held that the earth was flattened around the equator and bulged at the poles, this was not a direct result of work by Rene Descartes but seems to have been more a result of scientific nationalism. Spoiler: the earth is flattened at the poles.

From a practical point of view a non-spherical earth has implications for navigation – ultimately it was found that polar flattening would lead to a navigational error of approximately 20 miles in a trans-Atlantic crossing although at the time of the Mission it was believed it could have been as much as 300 miles. Politically the Mission provided an opportunity for the French to form an alliance with the Spanish, and to get a close look at the Spanish colonies in South America which had provided huge wealth to Spain over the preceding 200 years. Ferreiro provides a nice overview of the L’Académie des Sciences under whose aegis the mission was conducted,and of the Comte de Maurepas, French minister of the navy and sponsor of the Mission.

The core members of the Geodesic Mission were Pierre Bouguer, Charles-Marie de La Condamine, and Louis Godin they were accompanied by Spanish Naval cadets Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral  and Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Other members were Joseph de Jussieu (doctor and botanist), Jean-Joseph Verguin (engineer and cartographer), Jean-Louis de Morainville (draftsman and artist), Theodore Hugo (instrument maker), Jean-Baptiste Godin des Odonais and Jacques Couplet-Viguier.

Louis Godin, an astronomer, was the senior academician and nominal leader of the mission. Pierre Bouguer, was a mathematician, astronomer and latterly geophysicist: as well as the measurement of the degree of latitude he also attempted to measure the deflection of a plumb-line by the mass of a mountain – an experiment which Nevile Maskelyne was to conclude successfully in 1775, I wrote about this here. Bouguer also wrote a treatise on ship building whilst away in South America. Charles-Marie de La Condamine could best be described as an adventurer although he was also a competent mathematician and geographer, it was his more lively writing on life in South America which would have a bigger impact on their return to Europe.

The scheme for the determination of the length of a degree is to measure the length of a meridian (a line of longitude) close to the equator by triangulation, making a ground measurement baseline to convert the angular measurements of the triangulation survey into distances and a second baseline to confirm your workings; the latitudes of the ends of the triangulation survey are determined astronomically by measuring the positions of stars. I’ve read of this process before, the new thing I learnt was the method for aligning up your zenith sector with the meridian – which I’m tempted to try at home.

These measurements were done in the area around Quito, in modern Ecuador (named after the equator), the endpoints of the survey were at Quito in the north, close to the equator and Cuenca approximately 200 miles south. During the survey, through the Andes, the team scaled peaks as high as Mont Blanc (and suffered altitude sickness for their troubles) which would not be climbed for another 50 years. The survey was repeated in the early years of the 20th century and even then it took 7 years – the same length of time as the original survey, due to the transport difficulties presented by the terrain.

The work of measuring the meridian was made more difficult by the journey to get there (which took the best part of a year), the terrain and conditions when they got there (mountainous and cloudy), the poor leadership of Godin, local political machinations and the mother country cutting them loose financially. Ferreiro makes a lot of Godin’s poor leadership, some of which is justified – he spent Mission money on prostitutes and regarded the Mission funds as his own purse. Frequently the Mission split into two groups, one containing Bouguer and La Condamine and the other Godin – sometimes this is quite appropriate, in duplicating measurements for consistency whilst on other occasions it is simply fractiousness.

To a degree the Mission was scooped by measurements made above the Arctic Circle in Lapland, this mission was also promoted by the L’Académie des Sciences, led by Pierre Maupertuis (a rival of Bouguer) and Anders Celsius. It completed its work in 6 months, well before the Geodesic Mission had finished their work, discovering that the poles of the earth were flattened. However, doubts remained over the results and the full determination required the data from the equator. Bouguer presented this on his return to France, to great acclaim, showing that the earth was flattened by 1 part in 179 (later measurements showed that the flattening is actually smaller at 1 part in 298).

The Mission spawned a wide range of publications by its members, covering not only the geodesic component of the work but also regarding life and nature in South America. Ferreiro credits La Condamine’s work in particular has setting the context of how South America was viewed for quite some time after the mission. The Spanish officers also made in impact an highlighting colonial misrule back to their home country. Arguably the international collaborative elements of the Mission set the scene for the measurements of the transit of Venus later in the 18th century.

Ferreiro makes a comparison between the French Geodesic Mission, which was centrally run by the state and the British Longitude Prize, which although state funded was privately executed, implying that the former was superior. It’s not clear to me whether he’s engaging in a degree of hyperbole here, since the Mission was to some degree an organisational car-crash and was in large part funded from La Condamine’s own purse at the time. Furthermore, L’Académie des Sciences also awarded prizes – having copied the British government in this and the Royal Society was from the outset a very internationally oriented organisation. So the picture as Ferreiro presents it is something of an over-simplification.

I found the book very readable, its clearly based on a large quantity of primary source material and covers a great deal beyond the simple mechanics of the Geodesic measurements.

Footnotes

My Evernotes on the book are here.

Mar 25 2012

Book Review: The Great Arc by John Keay

TheGreatArcThis is a review of “The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named” by John Keay. This book does exactly what it says in the lengthy subtitle: describe the Great Triangulation Survey of India which was conducted in the first half of the 19th century.

It fits together with “Map of a Nation” by Rachel Hewitt and “The Measure of All Things” By Ken Alder. The former describes the detailed mapping of the United Kingdom by the Ordnance Survey, whilst the later describes the measurement of the Paris meridian by Méchain and Delambre. Of the three surveys the French one had been completed first at the beginning of the 19th century whilst the mapping of the UK was going on at the same time as the Indian survey.

The book is centred around the Great Arc survey originally proposed by William Lambton at the beginning of the 19th Century. Lambton’s aim was primarily to measure a meridian (a line of longitude), in the same manner as the Paris meridian in order to gain more information on the shape of the earth (geodesy). For his sponsors in England and the administration of India the survey served as a military and commercial exercise. Military action is often a spur to survey, since getting your troops and their equipment from point A to point B and ensuring they prevail over any forces they come across on the way is a high-value activity which is greatly assisted by the provision of accurate maps. Surveying is also invaluable when you are planning infrastructure such as roads, canals and railways.

The survey came a time when the British relationship with the area now known as India was changing from a trading one based on outposts to one in which the British took territory militarily. The Triangulation Survey was not exhaustive, it comprised a central spine (The Great Arc) running along the 78th meridian up through the tip of the Indian peninsular to the edge of the Himalayas with regular “cross-bars” running from West to East, towards the north an array of parallel meridians were also measure. (You can see a map here). The aim was to use this survey to constrain further local surveys.

The Great Arc survey was a great endeavour, taking 40 or so years in total, after Lambton died in 1823 George Everest took on the job of leading the project. Lambton seems to have been a pleasant sort of chap who went a little native, disappearing from the view of his sponsors. Everest, on the other hand, appeared to be a complete git – being abusive to most of his subordinates and apparently also winding up his superiors.

Much of the activity in the book is in common with that which took place during the surveys of France and the United Kingdom. Laying out base-lines: distances measured directly on the ground by means of rods or chains used to pin down the distances in the “triangulation” which is a collection of angular measurements at the vertices of an array of triangles. Once again the precision is impressive, two 7 mile baselines measured out 200 miles apart agree with the triangulation measurement to within a few inches. Angular measurements were made using a theodolite, Keay labels the one used in India as the “Great Theodolite”, which I thought was a term reserved for the Ramsden device used in the UK (we can’t all have a Great Theodolite!).

The Indian survey presented different challenges in the form of the wildlife (tigers, scorpions etc) but also disease. The rate of attrition amongst the surveyors, particularly as they traversed jungle was terrible. The book is not explicit about figures but in the later stages of the survey something like a thousand men were involved and a couple of hundred of those died of disease. Lambton and later Everest both suffered from recurring bouts of malaria.

The “discovery” of Mount Everest and the tallest peaks in the Himalayas was somewhat incidental to the main thrust of the survey. It had become clear in the first decade or so of the 19th century that the Himalayas were the tallest mountains in the world but their precise height was uncertain. Political difficulties with Nepal, their location far from the sea and their immense size meant determinations were poor. Indeed at the time of the beginning of the survey the height of Mont Blanc in Europe was only know to within a thousand feet or so of its currently accepted value. It wasn’t until 1856, after the Great Arc had been completed and Andrew Scott Waugh had taken over the survey that Mount Everest (known at the time as Peak XV) was measured and Waugh proposed Everest be its name. (Everest is apparently pronounced Eve-rest rather than Ever-est, and the man himself was very particular about this).

Put beside “Map of a Nation” and “The Measure of All Things”, “The Great Arc” is a nice, brief introduction to the theme of triangulation surveys and geodesy which covers measuring the height of mountains in a bit more detail than the other two.

The Great Arc survey, along with the French meridian survey fit together with the earlier French Geodesic Mission to Peru by Condamine and Bouger around 1735, which is described in “Measure of the Earth” by Larrie G. Ferreiro – I’ve added this to my wish list.

Footnotes

You can see my Evernotes on The Great Arc here.

Jun 28 2011

Book review: Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt

ordnance“Map of a Nation” by Rachel Hewitt is the story of the Ordnance Survey from its conception following the Jacobite Uprising in Scotland in 1745 to the completion of the First Series maps in 1870. As such it interlinks heavily with previous posts I have made concerning the French meridian survey, Maskelyne’s measurements of the weight of the earth at Schiehallion, Joseph Banks at the Royal Society, William Smith’s geological map of Britain and Gerard Mercator.

The core of the Ordnance Survey’s work was the Triangulation Survey, the construction of a set of triangles across the landscape made by observing the angles between landmarks (or triangulation points) ultimately converted to distances. This process had been invented in the 16th century, however it had been slow to catch on since it was slow and required specialist equipment and knowledge. Chromatic abberration in telescopes was also a factor – if your target is surrounded with multi-colour shadows – which one do you pick to measure? The triangles are large, up to tens of miles along a side, so within these triangles the Interior Survey was made which details the actual features on the ground – tied down by the overarching Triangulation Survey.

A second component of this survey is the baseline measurement – a precise measurement of the length of one side of one triangle made, to put it crudely, by placing rulers end to end over a straight between the terminal triangulation points.

The Triangulation Survey is in contrast to “route” or “transverse” surveys which measure distances along roads by means of a surveyor’s wheel, note significant points along the roadside. There is scope for errors in location to propagate. Some idea of the problem can be gained from this 1734 map showing an overlay of six “pre-triangulation” maps of Scotland, the coastline is all over the place – with discrepancies of 20 miles or so in places.

The motivation for the Ordnance Survey mapping is complex. Its origins were with David Watson in the poorly mapped Scotland of the early part of the 18th century, and the Board of Ordnance – a branch of the military concerned with logistics. There was also a degree of competition with the French, who had completed their triangulation survey for the Carte de Cassini and were in the process of conducting the meridian survey to define the metre. The survey of England and Wales was completed after the Irish Triangulation and after the Great Trigonometric Survey of India – both the result of more pressing military and administrative needs. As the survey developed in England more and more uses were found for it. Indeed late in the process the Poor Law Commission were demanding maps of even higher resolution than those the Ordnance Survey initially proved, in order to provide better sanitation in cities.

The Survey captured popular imagination, the measurements of the baseline at Hounslow Heath were a popular attraction. This quantitative surveying was also in the spirit of the Enlightenment. There was significant involvement of the Royal Society via its president, Joseph Banks, and reports on progress were regularly published through the Society. Over the years after the foundation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791 accurate surveying for canals and railways was to become very important. In the period before the founding of the Ordnance Survey surveying was a skill, related to mathematics, which a gentleman was supposed to possess and perhaps apply to establishing the contents of his estate.

Borda’s repeating circle, used in the French meridian survey to measure angles, found its counterpart in Jesse Ramsden’s “Great Theodolite“, a delicate instrument 3 feet across and weighing 200lbs. The interaction with the French through the surveying of Britain is intriguing. Prior to the French Revolution a joint triangulation survey had been conducted to establish exactly the distance between the Paris and Greenwich meridians, with the two instruments pitted against each other. There was only a 7 foot discrepancy in the 26 miles the two teams measured by triangulation between Dover and Calais. In 1817, less than two years after the Battle of Waterloo a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Biot, was in the Shetlands with an English survey team extending the meridian measurements in the United Kingdom.

The accuracy achieved in the survey was impressive, only one baseline measurement is absolutely required to convert the angular distances in the triangulation survey into distances but typically other baselines are measured as a check. The primary baseline for the Triangulation Survey was measured at Hounslow Heath, a second baseline measured at Romney Marsh showed a discrepancy of only 4.5 inches in 28532.92 feet, a further baseline measured at Lough Foyle, in Northern Ireland found a discrepancy of less than 5 inches in 41,640.8873 feet.

The leaders of the Ordnance Survey were somewhat prone to distraction by the terrain they surveyed across, William Roy, for example, wrote on the Roman antiquities of Scotland. Whilst Thomas Colby started on a rather large survey of the life and history of Ireland. Alongside these real distractions were the more practical problems of the naming of places: toponymy, particularly difficult in Wales and Ireland where the surveyors did not share the language of the natives.

Overall a fine book containing a blend of the characters involved in the process, the context of the time, the technical details and an obvious passion for maps.

Footnotes

In writing this blog post I came across some interesting resources: