It could be worse.

So, you thought you were having a bad day?

We all have them. Dealing with the poor payer, a client who just doesn’t ‘get it’ and never will. A technical problem that you just can’t work around and the only guy who can sort it out is in a meeting (on the golf course). It’s what business is about after all, crisis management. If everything went OK and all of our customers were perfect we wouldn’t have a job now would we? And it wouldn't be half as much fun.

But, if today happens to be one of those days, spare a thought for one of my heroes. For those of you who know me you will be aware, as I’ve probably bored you to tears about this , that my big interest is the History of Science. The subject is filled with an unending list of people of passion, trying to deliver an idea, who demonstrate degrees of obsession and drive that makes most of us look like the simpering wimps we largely are. Me, especially, included.

Scientific endeavour has as many courageous and determined participants as any field of human activity. Probably more. For me their stories serve as a constant reminder of what 'graft' really is and make me truly appreciate that the entrepreneurial and innovational ‘risks’ we take are, in the grand scheme of things and as our mothers often say, 'not worth worrying about'.

I started my a career as a cartographer, so it won’t surprise you, armed with that little snippet, to learn that the people who fascinate me most are those who mapped the world; dressed in tweed and canvas, they waved goodbye to their loved ones and cheerily disappeared into the undergrowth of another Continent. Not just for a month or two but in some cases for a whole generation. So, if ever you feel the sphincter muscle of fear contracting or get that stomach churning feeling that something big is about to go wrong or you think you have a ‘problem’, spare a thought for just one of this merry band. One Gulliame le Gentil. Or ‘Mad Bill ’ as we know him in our house.


His story takes place in the late 1700’s. One of the major challenges facing the intelligentsia ( Did I spell that right) in their drawing rooms across Europe, was to figure out just how big and what shape this piece of rock we are hurtling through space on actually is. Not for the least reason so that the people who did want to have a look around other parts of it could actually find their way back home to tell everyone what they had found. Some couldn't. One of the basic gaps of knowledge that would help us to find out just exactly where they were was to work our just how far we were away from the Sun. To do this they decided to use the astronomical phenomenon of the Transit of Venus, when the earth and the sun and Venus are all in a line,taking measurements of the aforesaid planet as it scribed its path as a little disc across the face of the Sun. This is something which happens about once in a blue moon but is not quite as rare an event as a politicians apology. Fortunately one such Transit was on the horizon, if you will excuse the pun. The plan was to dispatch people to different parts of the World; observe the transit at the same time, measuring angles and azimuths and such like and from the trigonometry they would, somehow- although I think I missed that particular maths lesson - be able to work it all out. This was the first truly international scientific project, with 60 teams from eight countries sent off to the furthest flung outposts of the known World. And what was known at the time, wasn’t really that much.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the task was beset by problems; Not just of the airline, ‘loosing your bags' kind of problem but slightly more dramatic; shipwrecks, pirates, disease, mauling by wild animals, the odd war. All the participants obviously had their own adventures and stories. Bill's story started a year before the transit when our hero was sent out from France. His target was to reach an observation site in Central India. He probably assumed that this would be one of the easier venues to reach. He certainly had drawn one of the longer straws compared to some of the spots that had been allocated to other teams. Siberia and the Middle of Wisconsin being the pick of the away days. But, due to a number of delays, I’m guessing possibly palm leaves on the line or the late arrival of an inbound brigand, on the day of the transit, he was still aboard his ship in the Indian ocean, unable to take the critical observations from the bobbing platform of his ship. He could see it, just not do anything about it.

Now most of us would have given up at this time but not our Bill. Oh no. Presumably he didn’t fancy the return trip because he decided to wait and observe the next transit- which according to the almanac would occur eight years later. The day of the transit arrived 4th June 1769. It dawned with a clear blue sky. But, for the whole duration of the 3 hour transit, one solitary cloud appeared out of nowhere and blocked the view.

Le Gentil, I like to think probably muttering a few expletives or maybe he gave just a gallic shrug, decided enough was enough and set off for the nearest port only to contract mega-dysentery en route which laid him up for another year.

He arrived home eleven and half years after leaving and had achieved pretty well nada, to find he had been declared dead by his nearest and dearest; all his possessions and property had been distributed with enthusiasm amongst them. Maybe there was a note saying dinner was in the oven'? We don’t hear a lot of him after that.

Other, possibly more famous names, were involved in the Project too. Mason and Dixon, before their four year sojourn into the New World to draw their famous a line that would divide a Nation, where given the Sumatra straw. But they never actually arrived, having been attacked and caught up in a small war with the French; who somewhat ironically, and scientifically at least, were supposed to be on the same side. In fact the whole project was a bit of a failure all around. When the results came in there were just too many readings with too many errors and differences to make any mathematical sense. For the mildly curious, as I am sure you are by now, the problem was eventually settled by one James Cook, former resident of my home county. His observations of the next transit ten years later in Tahiti, (Now there is a gig) gave enough good information for another Frenchman, Lalande, to calculate that our mean distance from the Sun is 150 million miles, give or take little bit.

I recounted this story to a group of school children, whose first question was ‘whatever did they do it for?’. 225 years later their work is brought into relevance as mankind faces one of its biggest challenges yet, that of Global Warming. There are hundreds of people whose exertions, (If ever is ever there is a word which understates their achevements then that is it), have contributed to the body of work, many of whom literally gave their lives to obtain this knowledge and provide us with the fundamental information. Knowledge which allowed us to measure and map the world and now allows us to detect and measure and predict the changes it will undergo.

We take for granted that we can now map the planet in an instant, and then bitch and moan when our GPS system fails to tell us that the road we are trying to go up in our air-conditioned iPod on wheels, is actually a one way street and we are heading the wrong way.

Makes you think doesn’t it!