Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The Brazilian delegate intervened in the three-way battle between France, Britain
and the USA. Brazilian charts were based on three meridians- its marine charts on Paris,
its geographic charts on Rio de Janeiro and its telegraphic system on Washington. He
would vote for the neutral meridian. Janssen said that it was time to vote and that he had
no wish that the discussion should last for ever. In the end the practicalities won out, the
least disturbance caused by continuing the de facto situation. The convention adopted
the Greenwich Meridian as the world standard by a large majority, with 21 votes in
favor and one against. Santo Domingo voted against for reasons that are still unknown
to this day; Brazil and France abstained.
The Conference went on to consider the matter of the unified system of time. It
adopted a resolution that defined the “universal day” to be the mean solar day starting
at midnight on the Prime Meridian, with time counted from midnight in 24 hours;
France once again abstained. The resolution was couched in neutral language and
did not mention Greenwich Mean Time, but the effect was to define the British
national time system as the world standard, under what came to be the “neutral”
name of Universal Time.
At the end of the Conference, France proposed a resolution calling for technical
studies to regulate and extend the decimalization of angle and time. This followed
the proposals of Borda dating back to the Commission on Weights and Measures in
1792. In addition, there was discussion as to whether this was within the scope of
the Conference. The conference had been long and tough, people wanted to go
home and there was a need to let Janssen walk away from it not entirely as a loser,
so the resolution was adopted by 21 votes to none with three abstentions.
The metric unit of angle is the
grad
, a hundredth of a right angle. This unit has
some usage in surveying and has been used as a matter of course by the French
army (e.g. in setting guns). In the 1970's and 1980's scientific calculators offered
the grad as the unit of angle input into calculations of trigonometric functions, as
well as radians and degrees, but this convenience for some people seems to have
declined in popularity because few people use the metric unit of angle.
The conclusion of the Conference settled the issue of the standard meridian in
the minds of the specialists but not in the minds of the legislators. It took many
years for the world time system to be accepted by individual countries, and France
was certainly not yet ready to yield up the status of the Paris Meridian. In 1895, the
sixth International Geographical Congress in London discussed the project of the
International Map of the World at one millionth scale. It had been proposed in 1891
by the German geographer Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) who argued that with the
exploration of the world virtually complete, the time was ripe to create a map with
common conventions of symbols, colors and depiction of topography. France
pressed for Paris to be its meridian of zero longitude (Showen 1984) but Britain
retaliated by disputing the use of the metric system on the map. This nationalistic
dispute was not solved until 1913, when Greenwich and the metric system were
adopted for this project. However, the wind was taken out of its sails when the
United States seceded from the arrangement in 1921 in despair at the international
squabbling and slow progress, and started making its own map of the Americas.
The project died a slow death, finally expiring in the 1980s.
