Cover Image: October 1999 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

A Matter of Degrees [Preview]

By James Burke















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I was on the flight deck of a transatlantic triple-7 recently, watching the onboard navigational magic, when it occurred to me that it all went back to

those two 18th-century French expeditions, sent to see if one degree of the meridian was longer up north than at the equator. The guy they sent south to


This article was originally published with the title A Matter of Degree.



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