One milligal is approximately one millionth of the Earth’s gravity field, so it would seem that the periods of pendulums used for measuring gravity would have to be measured to a few millionths of a second for the results to be useful. This was simply not possible in the early nineteenth century, but pendulums were being used then to obtain results accurate to a few tens of milligal. How was it done?
Louis de Freycinet had an elder brother, Henri,, and the two brothers joined the French navy on the same day in 1794. On the face of it, Henri had the more successful career, administering three colonies in succession, reaching the rank of Rear Admiral and becoming a baron. But it is Louis who is better remembered.
Ayn Rand thought that governments were not to be trusted, and the world would be a better place if they didn’t exist, but she still thought an army to be a necessity. More extreme libertarians disagree. They want lots of them.
Between April 1791 and January 1794, officers of Alejandro Malaspina’s mission to the Pacific measured gravity at no fewer than 17 different locations. It was the first truly global gravity survey, but how accurate was it?
Jean René Constant Quoy, senior surgeon on the Uranie, is something of a shadowy figure, but he did eventually write his memoirs.
TRANSLATION WORK IN PROGRESS. After their return from the Uranie expedition, Quoy and Gaimard presented a paper to the Académie royale des Sciences on the origin of coral reefs. It was a significant advance on what had gone before but, because they had never seen an atoll with a central volcanic peak, there was little chance that they would achieve the insights gifted to Darwin b his observations of TAhiti and Bora Bora.