spencer
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Well, I've been listening to one of Bill Bryson's more scholarly books, "A Short History of Nearly Everything," on my walk to and from work each day, and I learned something interesting yesterday...
he tells the story:
In 1774, a French scientist named Nevil Maskelyne brought a survey crew to Scotland to a particularly uniform mountain to try to calculate the earth's gravitational constant (G) with which they could then calculate the mass of earth.
The premise was that all masses exert some gravitational force on all other objects and that if one were to hold a plumb bob from the side of the mountain, the mountain would cause some miniscule offset from the normal hanging due to the earths gravitational pull. So, they set up measurements all over the mountain and recorded their measurements. When they tried to apply trigonometry to the the mess of numbers written down on a map, to pinpoint the locations of each measurement, they realized they couldn't make sense of such a jumble of numbers.
The mathemetician on the team, Charles Hutton, began using a pencil to connect the measurement points at each elevation. When he did this, he realized the shape of the mountain became very clear.
... so were born contour lines. Thank you Charles Hutton!
spencer
he tells the story:
In 1774, a French scientist named Nevil Maskelyne brought a survey crew to Scotland to a particularly uniform mountain to try to calculate the earth's gravitational constant (G) with which they could then calculate the mass of earth.
The premise was that all masses exert some gravitational force on all other objects and that if one were to hold a plumb bob from the side of the mountain, the mountain would cause some miniscule offset from the normal hanging due to the earths gravitational pull. So, they set up measurements all over the mountain and recorded their measurements. When they tried to apply trigonometry to the the mess of numbers written down on a map, to pinpoint the locations of each measurement, they realized they couldn't make sense of such a jumble of numbers.
The mathemetician on the team, Charles Hutton, began using a pencil to connect the measurement points at each elevation. When he did this, he realized the shape of the mountain became very clear.
... so were born contour lines. Thank you Charles Hutton!
spencer
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