The Measure of the World: A Novel

On June 24, 1792, two large traveling coaches left the Tuileries, one headed to Dunkirk, the other to Barcelona. They carried the astronomers Pierre Mechain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre, who had been ordered by the French revolutionary government to survey the meridian that passes through both cities and divide it to create a natural and universal unit of measure, the meter.
The Measure of the World is the story of this mission. Denis Guedj has written a novelistic account of the measurement project that relies heavily on archival sources - a more "traditional" history could not possibly describe how a sober scientific enterprise became a journey filled with adventures and experiences so bizarre as to be hardly credible. In tumultuous revolutionary and postrevolutionary France, Mechain and Delambre were objects of suspicion as they traveled through the provinces, climbing steeples and deploying strange instruments - they were detained as spies, taken for charlatans or fleeing royalists, and arrested for debt. Their perilous labors lasted until 1799, when the meter was formally established.