Measuring the Earth, Modernized

The fitting of lenses to surveying instruments in the 1660s greatly improved the accuracy of the Greek method of measuring the Earth, and this soon became the preferred technique. In its modern form, the method requires the following elements: two stations on the same meridian of longitude, which play the same parts as Aswan and Alexandria in the method of Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276–c. 194 bc); a precise determination of the angular height of a designated star at the same time from the two stations; and two perfectly level and accurately measured baselines a few kilometres long near each station. What was new 2,000 years after Eratosthenes was the accuracy of the stellar positions and the measured distance between the stations, accomplished through the use of the baselines. At each end of one baseline surveyors raise tall posts that can be seen from some nearby vantage point, say a church steeple, and the angle between the posts is measured. From a second viewpoint, say the top of a tree, the angle made between one of the posts and the steeple is taken. Observation from a third station gives an angle between the treetop and the steeple. Proceeding thus from positions on either side of the line to be measured, the surveyors create a series of virtual triangles whose sides they can compute trigonometrically from the observed angles and the measured length of the first baseline. The closeness of agreement between the calculation based on the first baseline and the measurement of the second baseline gives a check on the work.

During the 18th century surveyors and astronomers, practicing their updated Greek geodesy in Lapland and Peru, corroborated the conclusion of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), deduced at his desk in Cambridge, England, that the Earth’s equatorial axis exceeds its polar axis by a few miles. So precise was the method that subsequent investigation using it revealed that the Earth does not have the shape of an ellipsoid of revolution (an ellipse rotated around one of its axes) but rather has an ineffable shape of its own, now known as the geoid. The method further established the fundamental grids for the mapping of Europe and its colonies. During the French Revolution modernized Greek geodesy was employed to find the equivalent, in the old royal system of measurement, of the new fundamental unit, the standard meter. By definition, the meter was one ten-millionth part of a quarter of the meridian through Paris, making the Earth circumference a nominal 40,000 kilometres.