Interview with author Nicholas Crane and a tale of adventure and scientific discovery

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Award-winning writer and journalist Nicholas Crane has traveled extensively and perhaps this is what drew him to write about one of the world’s greatest scientific expeditions.

His bookLatitude; The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition’ follows a group of twelve European adventurer-scientists in the mid-eighteenth century. The team spent years in South America, scaling volcanoes and traversing jungles before they achieved their goal of establishing the exact shape of the Earth by measuring the length of 1 degree latitude at the equator.

Their discovery opened up the “possibility for safe, accurate navigation across the seas” and enabled the accurate accounting of future expeditions.

Author Nicholas Crane appears on Smart Talk Tuesday to share this inspiring true story.