Geoscience Reference
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another astronomer to lead it believing that Méchain was better employed as the
director of the Observatory. Méchain insisted that he should do it himself.
IN 1803 MÉCHAIN again set off to work in the south of France and Spain. We can
see something of his black depression at this time from the following letter to
Delambre:
Hell and all the plagues it spews upon the earth - storms, wars, pestilence and dark
intrigues - have all been unleashed against me. What demon still awaits me? But vain
exhortation will solve nothing, nor complete my task.
From Ibiza he found that he could not sight the mainland station at Montsia, as
he had planned. Attempting to complete his task before he returned to Paris,
Méchain was forced to change the pattern of his surveying and search for stations
further south than he had intended. He did not complete the measurements nor
return home. He was weakened by age, the work and his diet. He succumbed to
a fever - malaria, which he caught during his expeditions to remote triangulation
stations that he established in the marshy, mosquito ridden swamps of Albufera.
He collapsed and in September 1804 died in Valencia. He had mercifully been
released from his troubles. In his eulogy of Méchain, Delambre showed the deepest
sympathy for his perfectionism:
Never did he consider these observations, the most exact ever achieved in this domain and
conducted with unsurpassed certainty and precision, and never did he consider them suf-
ficiently perfected.
Delambre was appointed to write up the work on the Meridian, which he did in
a work called
Bas du Système Métrique
(Foundation of the Metric System). This
took him seven years and in compiling the definitive measurements he was scandalized
and perplexed by the irregularities in Méchain's work. Delambre discovered how
Méchain had altered observations to make them consistent, covering up discrepancies
in the latitude of Montjuïc. Working on his own, head down in his office, refusing
to discuss his work with anyone, providing only edited summaries to others,
Méchain had fudged the data, a process that was facilitated by the way that he kept
the original observations in pencil on scraps of data. Figures had been erased and
altered; original papers had been “lost.”
Delambre was heartened, though, by the discovery that Méchain had perpetuated his
scientific fraud in an “honest” way. The averages had not been altered, but what we
would now call the standard error, or spread of observations, had been reduced. This
made the observations seem more consistent than they otherwise would have appeared.
However, Delambre decided to suppress this discovery and explained why in notes
deposited in the archives of the Paris Observatory, where they lay unread and under seal
until they were found by historian Ken Alder two centuries later (Alder 2002).
I have carefully silenced anything that might alter in the least the good reputation M. Méchain
rightly enjoyed for the care he put into all his observations and calculations. If he dissimu-
lated a few anomalous results which he feared would be blamed on his lack of care or skill,
if he succumbed to the temptation to alter several series of observations…at least he did so
in such a way that the altered data never entered into the calculation of the meridian.
