The French Geodesic Mission (also called the Geodesic Mission to Peru, Geodesic Mission to the Equator and the Spanish-French Geodesic Mission) was an 18th-century expedition to what is now Ecuador carried out for the purpose of measuring the roundness of the Earth and measuring the length of a degree of latitude at the Equator. The mission was one of the first geodesic (or geodetic) missions carried out under modern scientific principles, and the first major international scientific expedition.
Read more about French Geodesic Mission: Background, Expedition, Observations During The Mission, Subsequent Mission, Monument, Publications
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“Vivian Rutledge: So you do get up. I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed like Marcel Proust.
Philip Marlowe: Who’s he?
Vivian: You wouldn’t know him. French writer.
Marlowe: Come into my boudoir.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)