Customer Reviews

The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...a whole book about some dusty old surveyors, trigonometric measurements, arcs of meridian and strange measuring devices called theodolites. Yes, and brilliantly done too and immensely readable. It's hard to believe that a book about such arcane subjects as those mentioned above could be made interesting - but Keay has done it.

There is no need no know trigonometry, cartography or any '-phy' for that matter. The book is short and so spends very little time on the technicalities of the subject, instead focusing more on where the interesting parts are always to be found - in the people and the places of these historical adventures. But what got the people - firstly Colonel William Lambton and then Sir George Everest (1790-1866), following Lambton's death in 1823, to the place - India, in the first place. An adventure in mapping. At the start of the 19th century cartography was still very basic. There were no standards of measurement or common method for portraying relief features such as mountains. Many parts of the world had not been surveyed and a complete grid of latitude and longitude lines covering the Earth was still decades away. The arc of the story was simply a part (a large part) of one such a line of longitude.

Lambton was like many surveyor's of the day in that it was typically the army that undertook these mapping projects, but what was not typical, was the man himself and the size of the project. Mapping India was a mammoth project and underlying it was Lambton's ultimate goal of obtaining an accurate measurement of the Earth. Thousands would be involved, it would take decades and outlast Lambton himself. The task would be finished in 1843 by Sir George Everest who would, along the way, have his name recorded for posterity on a certain Himalayan Mountain.

Although Lambton can not match Sir George Everest with a mountain as his public recognition, he might very well be satisfied with knowing that credit for starting The Great Trigonometric Survey, is all his and that even long after his death, his pioneering work was responsible for India being considered the best surveyed country in the world. Being the sort of man Keay depicts Lambton as, that would probably be praise enough for him.

This is a fun, short read.

The British Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was an epic undertaking spanning decades which took the measure of the sub-continent.

The book is a brief but lively biography of the two men who headed the survey - William Lambton and George Everest. The progress of their efforts across the Indian landscape makes for fascinating reading.

The amazing accomplishments of the Survey in the face of fever, tigers, and other resistance are highlighted in the book. The naming of Mount Everest is but an historical afterthought to the incredible saga of the Survey itself.

This entertaining and highly readable book does touch on some of the social, political, and scientific ramifications of Survey - but only briefly. The narrative is driven by the progress and setbacks of the Survey itself.

This is a most enjoyable read, much of the country is familiar (I recall my first sight of the mountains - incomprehensibly BIG!)and I could almost feel the heat of the plains and taste the dust. I would have liked to have seen some more of the country and felt that awful intensity when meeting some of the more interesting jungle wild life face to face. As a professional surveyor I skipped over some of the simplified explanations - at first. Going back over them I found some to be a little too trite - more could have been done to make the 'mechanics' of surveying a little more vibrant. The repeated use of 'one second of one minute of one degree' gets a bit irksome and is incorrect usage. Also, Nevil Maskelyne was never knighted; correctly (by the time of the story) he is the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne DD FRS, Astronomer Royal.

My recommendation - Buy 'The Great Arc' - its a book long overdue, a cracking good yarn and an entertaining read. PS - congratulations on finding Lambton - dead and alive. But where is the Indian Foot?

Similar scientific biographies such as this book have become quite common. Longitude and Riddle of the Compass are two that come to mind. I personally enjoy such books as they usually take something that most modern people take for granted and explain the work and effort that went into various types of discoveries.

The Great Arc is an interesting story of a very difficult subject. A survey of the Indian sub-continent was not only difficult due to the distances and the lack of computers to crunch the unbelievable amount of data, but also the weather and the various illnesses that seem to decimate these kinds of endeavors. William Lambton, who most people have probably never heard of, takes it upon himself as an officer in the British Army, to begin a survey of the Indian sub-continent done on an amazingly precise and accurate scale. The years that he spends battling the elements and the lack of help are well told. His successor, George Everest is an extremely difficult man to work for but he does yields some vast improvements to the surveying process.

Very little time is spent on Mount Everest, other than to explain the origin of the name and some of the debate about calculating the height of the mountain range. Overall, however, this book was an excellent story on the quest to survey with almost fanatical precision a large piece of the earth and the men, many of whom died in the process, whod dedicated their lives and careers to thsi endeavor.

An exhilarating history of two forgotten men, first William Lambton and then his successor Sir George Everest, who by sheer will power overcame enormous contrary forces to lay out the first geodetic survey of India. With more suspense than a Harrison Ford movie, John Keay tells us how the large teams that each Surveyor General commanded, from technicians down to coolies, battled numerous huge obstacles to triangulate the land mass of India. What's more amazing is that these triangles, dozens of miles on a leg, were accurate to within inches. It's hard to imagine the dedication of Lambton in 1820, working at night by kerosene lamp, evaluating complex trigonometrical formulas long before calculators were available. One numerical error in the fourth decimal place would cost months of backtracking, but few were made. Lambton and Everest loved their project.
One feels the slow pace of life in 19th century India. Things could stop for years, and then pick up again as if no time had passed. This enterprise was comparable in its time to the Apollo project of the 1960's in effort and scope, but it ran for roughly 60 years!
The story culminates with the first precise measurements of the Himalaya Mountains in Nepal. It is fitting that the peak that eventually emerges as the highest of all was given Everest's name (Lambton had died long before). And once again to our amazement, the altitude was correct!
Not many historians are comfortable with science and technology. So for every book about the relentless advance of those subjects, there are probably 50 rehashing the political intrigues of Europe. But Keay writes in a fascinating way about men who spent their lives immersed in these fields, and about Lambton's and Everest's faith that the future would belong to science, engineering, and technology as they moved forward on the bedrock of mathematics.

I enjoyed this book but perhaps not quite as much as John Keay's 'The Discovery of India'. Both books capture elements of the exoticness of India and even more so, the eccentric Englishmen who made their lives and endeavours in the country. As I have a mathematical background I would have liked some hard science details in the book - how does triangulation work with its dimensions of measurement (horizontal and vertical), how can independent checks be made by using astronomical sources, and so on. But I recognise that for many readers the omission of this material may be a significant positive!

I've given this five stars, as I did not have a clue about the issues involved and the people concerned that this book concerns, before I picked it up.

The best thing about it is it brings back two people and their associates, who had attained oblivion, to a sort of immortality.

Lucidly written and easy to get through, the book comes from a specialist on India with some fine books to his credit including a major history of the sub-continent.

I think this book makes a fine gift, and I've already started giving away copies.

Rarely are the hidden chapters of history which would ordinarily be considered too dry to even bother with returned to consciousness. The adventure, effort and facts about Indian Geography including the Himalaya and the lives of expatriate Englishpeople, stiching up an Empire - it makes absorbing reading.

This is the story of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, a nineteenth century project the purpose of which was to measure India - for scientific, but more importantly, for colonization reasons; that the plan did in fact succeed is utterly amazing when the nature of the problems involved is considered.

On paper it appears easy enough: triangulation uses Pythagorean theorems, in which if one knows the length of one side of a triangle, and the angles at which the other sides join it, the length of each of the other sides and the area enclosed by the triangle can be exactly calculated; then, using one of the calculated sides as the base for a new triangle, a second triangle can be calculated, and upon this one, another, and another, to infinity. The problem is the such plane geometry is lovely to look at, and to work with, on a piece of paper and in two dimensions, but very difficult to calculate over curved space containing mountains and valleys, tigers, yellow fever, monsoons and vast distances. The survey intended to measure India's length and its width. Named the Great Arc, the main trunk of the survey extended from the Southern tip of the subcontinent to the foothills of the Himalayas, about 1600 miles. It took forty years to complete.

It required extremely precise measurements, at times using a microscope to calibrate the instruments, and at times using telescopes to find the flag or the signal on which to focus the instruments, maybe forty miles away. In use was a huge theodolite (a surveying instrument) that weighed half a ton and had to be carried in its wooden box by fifteen men. Literaly thousands of people perished on the project: accidents, tigers, scorpions, snakes, and assorted fevers took their toll.

It is the story of William Lambton who initiated the project and died in the process, and of George Everest, who completed it. They were entirely different in character and outlook, but the passion to complete the mad project was equally strong in both. The book reads like a good novel, and one does not need to know math or trig to fully enjoy the narrative and understand the scientific issues involved. The book is hard to put down and is highly recommended for those who like true adventure stories and lively world history.

A thin but inspiring history: how William Lambton, George Everest (pronounced EVE-rest), and other hardy and dedicated souls mapped a great deal of India. The Arc was a series of triangles plotted through vertical and horizontal triangulation, sometimes confirmed by fixing one's place by observation of the stars. This mapping required braving malaria- and dysentery-infested forests and plains; crunching the numbers in impossibly complex equations; lugging a vast instrument called The Great Theodolite over rugged terrain; contructing towers and scaffolding for flagmen and flares, and huge amounts of patience. The story is awe-inspiring, if only for the bravery of these pioneers, who often faced greater casualty rates than soldiers in the name of science; but I was most impressed by the precision of the survey under the given conditions. Every variable was predicted and dealt with, even to attaching thermometers to the measuring-chains so as to calculate the metal's expansion and compensate in the resulting calculation. In all this plotting, the measuring of mountains was incidental, but Keay also reveals how the bad-tempered Everest somehow got his name attached to the world's highest peak. This book is a fine work of scholarship and very pleasant to read. However, it is a pity that there is so little on the reactions of Indians to the survey: I'd like to know how Everest's own native contingent felt, what local villagers thought on seeing the great procession, what the survey's own Indian mathmatical genius felt about the project. Perhaps there is no record of their feelings, but that's a shame. Otherwise, this is a stirring tale of human acheivement.

The title is perhaps a misnomer: the story is never quite so dramatic as it promises to be. I was led to this book by an episode of the PBS series Nova about the dispute over the relative heights of K2 and Everest. It was fascinating and it drew into the debate the story of Lambton and Everest's survey. I was hoping that this book would give me some of the details that the television show lacked the time to include. The book is solid on the history, but manages to keep its distance from the key characters (while letting interesting side characters and assistants slide from view). I was disappointed by the end, not really knowing much about the cantankerous Everest, or Lambton, and not full grasping why the British seemed so obsessed about a survey that they hadn't even completed for the British Isles.

The naming of the mountains is something of a footnote, and I believe hardly a definitive account of the politics behind it. Despite this, Keay is a capable writer, though one, it seems, hardly in the thrall of his topic. I was hoping to get a simplified, but vivid account of how surveying works, but I found the discussion a bit murky in the beginning, and no clearer by the end.

These complaints are apt to seem minor if you come to the topic with an avid interest in how India was mapped (though, of course, this would make you rather unusual), but I don't think you will develop that interest in reading the book. Good nonfiction should stimulate the reading of more nonfiction in related areas, but I find myself looking elsewhere now. Clearly, the great arc was one of the most incredible scientific achievements of its or any other age -- taking over fifty years to complete. It's a shame that Keay's book doesn't really convey both the enormity of the task and the passion that led to its completion.