Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
The Paris Meridian in the Napoleonic Wars
Méchain's unfinished work on the survey of the Paris Meridian in the Balearic
Islands was completed by Jean-Baptiste Biot and François Arago.
People
Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862)
Biot was educated as a mathematician, with his father intending that he should be active in
commerce, but after a spell in the army as a gunner during the revolutionary wars in
1792-94, he became a professor of mathematics. He was appointed to the Paris Observatory
in 1806 and later became professor of astronomy at the Paris Faculty of Sciences of the
University of France (established by Napoleon in 1808) where he spent the rest of his
career. He was an ardent exponent of Newton's Theory of Gravity and his textbook was the
one from which Sir George Airy, later the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, learned
astronomy. In 1803, Biot investigated the reports that stones had fallen from the sky at
l'Aigle in the Orne. At the time such reports had been thought to be superstition and mis-
guided but regardless Biot visited the area, spoke to witnesses and collected specimens. He
showed that the composition of the stones bore no resemblance to the geology of the
region, and his report was the beginning of the realization of the truth about meteorites- that
they fall from space.
Dominique François Jean Arago (1786-1853) was born and educated in the south
of France in Estagel, Roussillon, in the eastern Pyrenees and at that time a small
village (Daumas 1943; see also Anon 1854 and Howard-Duff 1986). His father
originated in Catalonia, Spain and was cashier at the regional mint. Arago was one
of a family of eight children comprised of six sons and two daughters. As he grew
to a tall and lean maturity (
Fig. 33
), he taught himself mathematics to a standard
good enough to enter the examination in 1803 for places at the Polytechnic School
in Perpignan and was attracted by the splendid uniform of an officer of engineers to
a military career. The school had been founded only eight years earlier to provide
opportunities for people to develop their skills for the service of the state.
But as Arago was about to set off, his father had a visitor, Pierre Méchain, who
was carrying out his survey of the southernmost section of the Paris Meridian.
Arago's father asked Méchain his advice regarding his son's career and the mathe-
matical education that he was seeking. “With the frankness which is my characteristic,”
Méchain said, “I ought not to leave you unaware that it appears to me improbable
that your son, left to himself, can have rendered himself completely master of
the subjects of which the programme consists. If, however, he be admitted, let him
