1-624-448 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, French mathematician and astronomer, (1836). Delambre (1749-1822) was Director of the Paris Observatory. Together with Pierre Mechain, between 1792 and 1799 he undertook an expedition to measure precisely the distance along the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona in order to establish the exact length of the metre on the basis of it being 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator.