Do you know Colonel Sir George Everest? You may probably not have heard of him, but I bet you find his last name fascinating. Does it ring a bell? I bet it does. Who has not heard of the highest mountain above sea level on earth which goes by the name of Mount Everest?
Now we are getting somewhere.
But just in case you did not know, now is a great time to catch up. The man, Sir George Everest is a British surveyor, and geographer and the highest mountain is then known as Peak XV was renamed in his honour.
Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn) via Flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0): Mount Everest Base Camp and Rongbuk monastery
George Everest was then the Surveyor General of India. The man that did the measurement was an Indian mathematician,…show more content… Though the announcers added 2 feet to make it more believable
Waugh concluded that Peak XV was "most probably the highest in the world".Peak XV (measured in feet) ... to be exactly 29,000 ft (8,839.2 m) high, but was publicly declared to be 29,002 ft (8,839.8 m) in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet (8,839.2 m) was nothing more than a rounded estimate. Waugh is sometimes playfully credited with being "the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest".Wikipedia.
The official height of Mount Everest established nearly a century later in 1955 by the Indian survey is 8,848m (29,029 ft). In 1999, a team from the USA armed with the latest technology of GPS were able to measure the mountain to be 29,035 ft which merely is 33 feet off from the last century's measurement! How did the 19th-century surveyors get this…show more content… How they did it
The answer is staring us in the face all along. It is one word: mathematics. Or more specifically trigonometry.
By Adrignola (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
The Everest team employed the help of trigonometry which involves less sophisticated instruments such as that obtainable by the modern day use of GPS. The triangles, similar to that of the principle of GPS, is what the Victorian surveyors used to measure tall structures before the technology of satellite was around.
If we want to calculate the height of an unknown tall object, a tree, like in this example. Let us assume we are 20 feet away from the base of the tree and our height is 5 feet. The unknown height of the tree is T.
By Hawksworth (engraver) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons: The type of theodolite used by Sir Everest in measurement of Mount Everest Elevation
The theodolite is similar to an advanced protractor. It is used in the measurement of the angles of elevation (like the 38° angle in the above example) and depression.
To calculate the height of the tree, T we shall use the trigonometry.
