"The academicians—especially in the person of Picard—were carrying through a revolution in observational astronomy made possible by Huygens' astronomical pendulum clock, the filar micrometer perfected (if not invented) by Auzout, and the application of telescopes to large-scale graduated instruments appropriate for the measure of small angles. It was with this equipment that Picard undertook to measure the distance between two localities approximately on the meridian of Paris, to determine the differences in their latitudes, and to deduce from those results the length of degree of meridian. The eminently successful arc measure, marked by a precision thirty to forty times greater than any previously achieved..."
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Astronomers from the NetherlandsPhysicists from the NetherlandsMathematicians from the NetherlandsPeople from The Hague
Original Language: English
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Sources
Seymour Chapin, "The Men from Across La Manche: French Voyages, 1670-1790" in Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook (1990) ed., Derek Howse
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens
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Christiaan Huygens
1629 – 1695
niederländischer Astronom, Mathematiker und Physiker
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