William Lambton

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William Lambton

William Lambton , FRS (* c. 1756 in Crosby Grange near Northallerton , North Yorkshire , England ; † January 19, 1823 in Hinganghat, Wardha District, Maharashtra , India ) was a British soldier , surveyor and geographer who was the initiator and first director of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India.

Life

William Lambton was born in 1756 in Grosby Grange near Northallerton in North Yorkshire to a farmer who lived in simple circumstances. He avoided giving information about his origins all his life. His exact date of birth is therefore not known, other sources give 1753 as the year of his birth.

After elementary school, he received one of four scholarships to Northallerton Grammar School . From 1781 he served in the army. In 1794 he was promoted to lieutenant. Until about 1795 he was barracks manager in Saint John (New Brunswick) in Canada . In another use it came to the Cape of Good Hope in 1796 , then to Bengal and in 1798 to Madras. During these years he learned mathematics, trigonometry and astronomy in self-study. Under Colonel Arthur Wellesley , who later became the 1st Duke of Wellington , he took part in the siege of Seringapatam in the Fourth Mysore War in 1799 . He saved his unit through his ability to orientate himself towards the stars. He then served on the Coromandel Coast in south- east India, where, at his suggestion, he received the order to carry out a survey to connect the Coromandel coast with the Malabar coast in south-west India and to measure a meridian arc . It took until 1802 for the necessary instruments to arrive in Madras. The establishment and measurement of the baseline at Madras was not only Lambton's first activity in the context of this assignment, but also the basis for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India that followed in the following years. In 1806 he was able to complete the triangulation via Bangalore to Mangalore on the west coast. He then began measuring the meridian arc in Bangalore, first to the south to Cape Komorin , the southern tip of India, then from Bangalore to the north. When his unit returned to England in 1812, Lambton remained in India as head of that survey. Over the years the work slowly moved north until it left the government area in Madras and came under the government in Calcutta . George Everest was appointed his assistant in 1817 and began his career the following year. Colonel Lambton never saw the completion of his great work. He died in 1823 at the age of almost 67 in the small town of Hinganghat, where his surveying work had taken him.

Services

William Lambton carried out one of the largest surveying projects of his time with his Large Trigonometric Survey. This required years of work, traveling with heavy equipment (his theodolite weighed half a ton) and correspondingly numerous escorts in various, often malaria-infested areas, unwavering perseverance, patience and the greatest accuracy. His measurements allowed for the first time an exact assignment of Indian cities and geographical points. During his first triangulation from Madras to Mangalore, he determined a distance of around 360 miles compared to the 400 miles that had been assumed until then based on the existing inaccurate map material. His measurements of the meridian arc contributed significantly to the clarification of the shape of the earth . The flattening of the earth at the poles was already known, but the extent of this flattening was the big question at the time. Lambton laid the foundations for Indian surveying, which his successor George Everest was able to develop and expand.

Honors

Lambton became a member of the Royal Society (FRS - Fellow of the Royal Society) (January 9, 1817), a member of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in the Astronomy Section (December 15, 1817).

literature

  • John Keay: The Great Arc - The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. Harper Perennial, New York 2001, ISBN 0-06-093295-3 .
  • Oliver Schulz: India on foot - A journey on the 78th degree of longitude. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-421-04474-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Manners Chichester:  Lambton, William . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 32:  Lambe - Leigh. , MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1892, pp. 25 - 26 (English).
  2. ^ A b c Clements R. Markham: A Memoir on the Indian Surveys . (PDF; 57.8 MB) 2nd edition. Allen and Co. London 1878. Digitized on archive.org
  3. ^ R. Ramachandran: Survey Saga on Frontline, April 27, 2002. Retrieved July 20, 2012
  4. ↑ List of Fellows of the Royal Society (PDF; 1.0 MB)
  5. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter L. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 8, 2020 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Lambton, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British geodesist
DATE OF BIRTH 1756
PLACE OF BIRTH Crosby Grange at Northallerton , North Yorkshire, England
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1823
Place of death Hinganghat, Wardha district, Maharashtra , India