Biographies
Sir George Everest , 1790-1866, British surveyor, b. Breconshire, Wales. He worked on the trigonometrical survey of India from 1806 to 1843. He became superintendent of the survey in 1823 and surveyor general of India in 1830; Mt. Everest is named for him. He was knighted in 1861.
Gerardus Mercator , Latin form of Gerhard Kremer , 1512-94, Flemish geographer, mathematician, and cartographer. He studied in Louvain , where he had a geographical establishment (1534). From 1537 to 1540 he surveyed and mapped Flanders . In 1538 he produced his first map of the world (based on Ptolemy's map); in 1541 he made a terrestrial, and in 1551 a celestial, globe. He was appointed (1552) to the chair of cosmography in Duisburg. In 1554 he made a six-sheet map of Europe. The first map using the projection (the translation of the spherical earth to a two-dimensional flat plane) that bears his name appeared in 1569. Accurate in equatorial regions but distorting the size and shape of numerous other areas of the world, the Mercator projection has been more generally used than any other projection for navigators' world maps. In 1585, Mercator began a work (for which he coined the word atlas ) that included many of his earlier maps; the atlas was completed by his son and published in 1594. Mercator did cartographical work for Charles V and was cosmographer to the duke of Jülich and Cleves. He wrote several books on subjects such as ancient geography and the science and mathematics of geography and cartography. Bibliography: See N. Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (2003).
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton 1874-1922, British antarctic explorer, b. Ireland. The first of his voyages to Antarctica was made as a member of the expedition (1901-4) of Robert F. Scott . Shackleton was invalided home in 1903, but the experience gained on the Scott expedition aided him greatly as commander of a south polar expedition (1907-9). In the course of this expedition Mt. Erebus was ascended, the south magnetic pole was located, and the polar plateau was crossed to a point less than 100 mi (160 km) from the South Pole. The scientific results of the expedition were of vast importance. Knighted in 1909, Shackleton published that year an account of his expedition, The Heart of the Antarctic. As commander of a transantarctic expedition, he set out in 1914, planning to enter the Weddell Sea and cross on foot over the south polar region to the Ross Sea, a distance of c.2,000 mi (3,200 km). When his ship Endurance was crushed in the ice in Oct., 1915, he led his party some 180 mi (290 km) to safety at Elephant Island; from there Shackleton with five companions in a lifeboat made a voyage of c.800 mi (1,290 km) through wild seas, then crossed rugged, glaciated South Georgia Island to reach (May, 1916) a whaling station on its north coast. Shackleton rescued his Elephant Island party and later returned to the Weddell Sea to pick up others left there earlier in the expedition. His South (1919) is an account of the whole expedition. In 1921 Shackleton sailed on the ...
Sir Henry Bessemer , English engineer and inventor, b. Charleton, Hertfordshire. He made experiments to obtain stronger material for gun manufacture and discovered the basic principle of the Bessemer process . In 1856 he read before the British Association at Cheltenham his important paper "The Manufacture of Iron without Fuel." He built a successful converter and later erected the Bessemer Steel Works at Sheffield, which began to operate in 1859 and soon produced iron so cheaply that he could undersell his competitors. In the United States the Bessemer process was patented in 1857, but Bessemer's priority right there was challenged by William Kelly, and in the end the battle between the two interests was settled by a consolidation of the rival companies. Bessemer received many honors for his signal achievement and was knighted in 1879. Bibliography: See his autobiography (1905, new ed. 1924).
The biographies included in this category range from giants in the area of earth and the environment to lesser known, but equally important, scientists, scholars and inventors. We have content about the world’s most famous oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau, who was credited with inventing scuba gear, wrote books, and released movies. Other biographies include Vilhelm Frimann Koran Bjerknes, the Norw ... Read more
egian physicist and pioneer of modern meteorology. Beyond innovations in predicting the weather, his research also was important in the development of wireless telegraphy. Each biography includes links to more information, images, and additional writings.