What was the world's first international scientific expedition? Scientist-explorers of the Enlightenment, such as Alexander von Humboldt, would have answered without hesitation: the French government's eight-year geodesic mission to the Spanish colony of Peru, beginning in 1735. The mission -the subject of Measure of the Earth - calculated the precise length of a degree of latitude at the equator, thereby helping to define Earths shape. Today, the geodesic mission's fame has faded. Until this book, no modern history of the mission has been published in English (unpublished academic studies exist). It was virtually ignored in Ken Alder's prize-winning account of the surveying of the arc of the meridian and the origins of the metric system, The Measure of All Things (Free Press, 2002).
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