To prove their idea, the Academy in Paris staged two expeditions, one to Peru (now Ecuador) at the equator, and the other to the border of Sweden and Finland in the northern hemisphere. The English, using Sir Isaac Newton's universal theory of gravity and the knowledge that the Earth spun around its axis, thought that the Earth was oblate, or flattened at the poles. The French argued that the Earth was prolate, or shaped like an egg. Soon they became locked in a battle to determine the shape of the Earth. "In the latter part of the 17th century, the Royal Society in London and the L'Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris were founded. By the end of the 19th century, major triangulation networks covered the United States, India, Great Britain, and large parts of Europe. Triangulation formed the basis for many national surveys. Triangulation is a method of determining the position of a fixed point by measuring the angles to it from two other fixed points that are a known distance apart. In the 16th and 17th centuries, triangulation started to be used widely. As technology developed, scientists and surveyors began to use different techniques to measure distance.
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