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The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named
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The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named
By
John Keay
The Great Arc asks you to imagine a world without maps, a world where distance, height and depth cannot be taken for granted and where any journey is largely guesswork. The Great Indian Arc of the Meridian, begun in 1800, was the longest measurement of the Earth's surface ever to have been attempted. By the time it was completed 50 years later, more than 1,600 miles of the Indian sub-continent from its southern tip to the Himalayas together with the precise curvature of the Earth, had been surveyed inch-perfectly, effectively opening up the county to the present-day network of roads, railways and telegraph systems. Today, it still remains both one of the great scientific achievements of the 19th century and a lasting testament to Britain's colonial folie de grandeur. Mapping the sub-continent was a mathematical nightmare and the computations could have filled a library. However, it was also a technical nightmare. Each reading could only be confirmed from a location whose precise co-ordinates and height above sea-level were also known, so the operation involved a snail-like zig-zag along every metre of t he country, through jungle, rivers and across mountain ranges. Death and disease stalked the operation with countless casualties lost t o malaria and wild animals, but the single-minded Brits persevered.
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