Full Meridian of Glory: Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth by Paul Murdin is an adventure story of the Paris Meridian and the scientists who worked through revolution, war, rebellion, piracy, fire, shipwreck, blockade, snow, tropical heat, kidnapping, murder and turbulent love affairs to pursue an intellectual problem of mapmaking and science.
Financed by the French government, the Paris Academy of Sciences was put to the task to measure France by defining the line later known as the Paris Meridian. From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, a multitude of astronomers and geodesists were employed to extend this work to measure the entire Earth. This book is about what they did and why.
Full Meridian of Glory is the first English-language account of this historical material in its entirety. It is the story of the scientists who created the Paris Meridian, and collaborated in alliances and split into warring factions. The book details the personal, national and political conflicts and disputes as they strived for ideals of accuracy, truth and objectivity.
Murdin vividly writes about the adventures of the scientists in France, Spain, Lapland and Ecuador who pursued their quest to measure the globe. They turned a practical problem into a crucial scientific test of one of the most important intellectual problems of their time – Newton's theory of universal gravitation. Their work affected the course of science and politics, and left its mark on the landscape, the art and the literature of history and of our own age.
Paul Murdin is treasurer of the Royal Astronomical Society and Senior Fellow at Cambridge University.
Full Meridian of Glory is published by Springer, the second-largest publisher of journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector and the largest publisher of STM books. Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media, one of the world's leading suppliers of scientific and specialist literature.
Paul Murdin
Full Meridian of Glory: Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth
2009. 188 pages, 39 illus., 31 in color
Hardcover $27.50, £15.99, €19.95
Springer ISBN 978-0-387-75533-5