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Background to the Great Arc
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In April 1802, the relatively comfortable cool days of winter were giving way to rising temperatures and increasing humidity while the sultry Indian summer loomed endlessly ahead. As fellow British officers explored ways to escape the heat, Colonel William Lambton made plans to measure the Empire’s greatest treasure as well as the curvature of the earth. This ambitious and seemingly impossible plan, was to measure the arc of the meridian, by trigonometric survey: the longest measurement of the earth’s surface ever undertaken. Little did he know at the time that the task would take nearly 50 years and it would be his successor, George Everest (after whom a small mountain was named), who would see it finally completed.
Malaria, tigers, swamp fever and a host of other ills took their toll but the survey, in the true British never give up spirit, marched on and on mapping the sub-continent from the tip of India in the south to the very Himalayas themselves. George Everest is remembered by having a mountain named after him but Lambton, the father of the survey, is long forgotten.
The plan succeeded, and today, over 200 years later, we will celebrate and acknowledge the creation of what has come to be known as The Great Arc, by driving the 78’ meridian, upon which, modern mapping and surveying of the Indian peninsula is still based.
The 2,400 miles of inch-perfect surveying was, and still remains, one of the greatest human endeavours ever undertaken. Braving forest, flood and fever for over 50 years, the British surveyors and their Indian staff carried instruments weighing over half-a-ton to make possible the mapping of the entire Indian subcontinent. Half-a-century of dedicated effort consumed the lives of more men than most contemporary wars.
The equations that they used to calculate the curvature of the earth are more complex than any that had been formulated in the pre-computer age, and have been likened to as much of a technological achievement as man stepping foot on the moon in 1969. Precision was the mantra; and it was so rigorously maintained that even today, despite more sophisticated mapping equipment and survey methods, the values arrived at then, using those techniques, cannot be disputed.
And so, we give you the greatest adventure of this millennium.
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