Sir George Everest

Sir George Everest (1790-1866), British surveyor and administrator, for 20 years head of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.

Everest was born probably in Greenwich, England, and at the age of 16 joined the East India Company as a lieutenant in its army. In 1812 he took part in the siege of Kalinjar (now the state of Madhya Pradesh, India). In 1814 he was appointed by Sir Stamford Raffles to survey the island of Java, which had been captured from the French in 1811. It was returned to its original colonizers, the Dutch, in 1816. From 1816 to 1817 Everest was in charge of clearing navigational obstacles in the Ichamati and Matabhanga rivers of the Ganges delta area. In the latter year he was appointed the assistant to William Lambton of the Survey of India, which the British government had just taken over from the East India Company and dubbed the Great Trigonometrical Survey.

In 1819 he led his first surveying mission, mapping about 110 km (about 70 mi) between Hyderābād in south central India and the Godāavari River through a heavily forested region. Twice his party was laid low by malaria and forced to abandon the effort. After a year of recuperation in Cape Town, South Africa, Everest returned to India and completely reorganized the Survey’s working practices, abandoning work during the rainy season when the air was clearest but malaria most virulent, and instead working during the cold and dry seasons, when dust in the atmosphere made sightings from one observation point to another difficult. Everest solved this problem by taking his sightings at night, fixing the observations from one tower by identifying flares on the next tower, rather than by trying to sight the tower itself during the day. With this method, using blue lightflares that burned a compound of sulfur, niter, camphor, indigo, cotton, and sheep’s bladder, observations could be made from a distance of up to 95 km (60 mi). Throughout his career in the Survey, Everest insisted on directing every observation and taking each measurement with the theodolite (an optical instrument with a small mounted, rotating telescope) himself.

Continuing Lambton’s project of surveying northward along longitude 78° east, Everest reached Sironj in November 1824. He then spent from 1825 to 1830 on leave in Britain, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1827. In 1830 he was appointed Surveyor General of India, and published an account of his work to date.

In that year he returned to India and continued surveying up the 78th meridian, building 14 masonry towers up to 21 m (70 ft) high, between Sironj and Dehra Dūn in the foothills of the Himalayas, which he reached in 1834. Here he established his new headquarters. When his assistant, Andrew Waugh, completed a remeasurement of the central Indian baseline at Bīdar in 1841, the backbone of the survey was complete. As well as establishing the framework on which future surveying of the subcontinent would be completed, Everest had completed the direct measurement of more than 20 degrees of an arc of the meridian, enabling a new level of accuracy in geodesy, the study of the shape of the earth.

Everest retired in 1843, and in 1847 published An Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India. He married in 1846, and had six children in his retirement. Only after he had left India did the Survey begin measuring the peaks of the Himalayas, a task the Survey was obliged to do from distances of up to 260 km (160 mi) because they were barred from entering Nepal. In 1850 six separate measurements were made of Peak XV, yielding an average height of 8,839 m (29,002 ft; the accepted figure today is 8,850 m/29,035 ft). In 1856 Andrew Waugh announced this measurement at a meeting of the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, India, naming the peak Mount Everest after his illustrious predecessor.

Everest was knighted in 1861 and died in London on December 1, 1866.