Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America. (Science News Books).Edwin Danson. Commissioned to settle an 80-year-old colonial land dispute between the Baltimore and Penn families, English astronomers Charles Mason
Mason's early career was spent at the Royal Greenwich Observatory near London. and Jeremiah Dixon Jeremiah Dixon (July 27 1733 – January 22 1779) was an English surveyor and astronomer who is perhaps best known for his work with Charles Mason, from 1763 to 1767, in determining what was later called the Mason-Dixon line. set sail to America in 1763. Their assignment became a 5-year-long quest to establish "the eighteenth century's most ambitious geodetic survey geodetic survey n. A survey of a large area of land in which corrections are made to account for the curvature of the earth. geodetic survey , and a project without precedent," according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Danson. In this first nonfiction chronicle of the demarcation between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the author transports the reader back in time to a young America struggling to adapt the Old World's system of ownership rights. The two surveyors encountered an untamed landscape offering few creature comforts and populated by American Indians who resented land-claiming colonials. Mason and Dixon not only overcame these obstacles and successfully surveyed the line bearing their namesakes, but they also took the first scientific gravity measure-merits ever recorded in America. In many ways, Danson's tale reads as an adventure story enhanced by details about the development of geodetic See geodetic coordinates. science and its instruments. Wiley, 2001, 232 p., b&w photos/illus., hardcover, $24.95. |
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