James Thomas Walker

James Thomas Walker (born December 1, 1826 in Kannur , Kerala , India , † February 16, 1896 in London ) was a British officer and geodesist .

Live and act

James Walker was born in what was then Cannanore in the Malabar district of the Madras Presidency , the son of a British East India Company official . After training by a private teacher in Wales , at the East India Company Military Seminary in Addiscombe and at the British pioneer school , the Royal School of Military Engineering in Chatham (Kent) , he began his service in Bombay in 1846 . During and after various campaigns in what is now Pakistan , he primarily devoted himself to surveying the annexed areas.

On December 1, 1853 he was appointed second assistant to the Grand Trigonometric Survey under Andrew Scott Waugh and promoted to first assistant on March 24, 1854. Walker was initially concerned with triangulations on the Indus . In the Indian uprising of 1857 he was seriously injured in fighting and contracted cholera . In December 1857 he was promoted to captain , in January 1858 to major . In the next few years he continued the survey work between and during various military missions.

On March 12, 1861 he was appointed head of the large trigonometric survey. In the following two years he first completed triangulations in northern India. After he had established a baseline in Visakhapatnam in 1862 , it was found that its actual length only deviated by half an inch (about one centimeter) from the length calculated on the basis of the survey network that had its starting point in Calcutta , 770 km away ran through dense jungle over long distances. In 1864, on the way to his home leave, he took the route via St. Petersburg , where he established connections with Russian surveyors, which led to a continuous exchange of experiences. A few years later it was decided to publish a report on the work on the Great Trigonometric Survey of India ( Account of the Operations of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India ) in twenty volumes, of which the first nine volumes were published under Walker's direction from 1871. In 1873 he began to clear up the inevitable small inaccuracies in the survey, so that the trigonometric survey of India was considered the most accurate of its time.

On January 1, 1878, he was appointed Surveyor-General of India, but at the same time retained his position as head of the Great Trigonometric Survey. At the headquarters of the Survey of India in Dehradun , Uttarakhand , in addition to monitoring the surveying work and creating numerous maps, he also dealt with other areas such as training the next generation, the deployment of surveying teams to military operations or the training and dispatch of local surveyors who should be known as pundits .

He took his leave on February 12, 1883 with the rank of Lieutenant-General ( Lieutenant General ). Less than a year later he was promoted to honorary general. He died in London on February 16, 1896.

Honors

Walker became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1859 and the Royal Society in 1865 , in 1868 he became a member of the Russian Geographical Society and in 1887 of the Société de geographie de Paris .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This article is largely based on the biographical treatise by Robert Hamilton Vetch: Walker, James Thomas in the Dictionary of National Biography
2. ↑ List of Fellows of the Royal Society (PDF; 1.1 MB)