A Short History of Nearly Everything

This chapter deals with measuring the Earth, and Bryson begins by introducing the French Royal Academy of Sciences’ Peruvian Expedition of 1735, led by Pierre Bouguer, a hydrologist, and Charles Marie de La Condamine, a mathematician. The purpose of the journey was to triangulate distances through the Andes, which would ultimately allow the French scientists to measure the circumference of the planet.

Part of what led the French scientists to the Andes instead of simply measuring France was a problem that had first come about with the English astronomer Edmond Halley. Halley, a well-respected scientist and inventor, was driven by a wager he made with fellow scientist Sir Christopher Wren. Wren offered a prize of forty shillings (worth a couple of weeks’ pay), to whoever could figure out why planets orbited in an elliptical pattern. Halley became obsessed with knowing the answer and went to Cambridge to ask Isaac Newton for the answer.

Newton, Cambridge’s Professor of Mathematics, was a genius, and equally strange as he was intelligent. Although he is known for inventing calculus, he also spent much of his secret life studying alchemy and the floor plans of the lost Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem, in the hopes of predicting Christ’s second coming and the subsequent apocalypse.