Abstract
IT is known that the mile of 1609 metres long passed among English geographers and navigators as being the length of the terrestrial arc of 1′; in other words they made the degree equal to 60 of these miles. In reality it contains 69.5; there is thus an error of about one-sixth. This error, if it existed long among our neighbours, which I do not know, must have caused many a shipwreck. It has had another very remarkable result; it nipped in the bud the discovery of the law of universal attraction. The first time that Newton's great idea presented itself to his mind the proof failed him, because he made use of the common English mile to calculate the radius of the earth. He renounced the idea for a long time, and only took the calculation up again when he learned the results of Picard's measurement of a degree in France. Whence comes this defective estimate? Certainly it does not proceed from any effective measurement, for the worst degree measurements, among those which have been really made, and not fictitious measurements, like that of Posidonius, are far from presenting errors of such magnitude. English geographers then must have committed some mistake in taking their mile from ancient documents.
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Origin of the English Mile 1 . Nature 24, 80–81 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/024080e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/024080e0