La medida del meridiano

On May 26, 1735, the young Spanish sailors Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa left Cádiz aboard the ships Conquistador and Incendio to join an expedition from the Paris Academy of Sciences in Cartagena de Indias to measure the arc of one degree of meridian at the equator. It was about knowing the figure of the Earth, a question -whether it was melon or watermelon- that had taken a great boom since Newton established that the planet was an oblate ellipsoid and that ended up becoming the most important scientific controversy of the Enlightenment . This book recounts the monumental task that Spanish sailors carried out together with French academics between 1735 and 1744, on a grueling journey through the western Andes mountain range.