at university and then trying to commute every day right across the city for my first job. London during that period was a mess: the glistening towers of Docklands rising fast out of the debris around them, a glassy two fingers to the squalor and poverty, the doorway-sleepers and the disenfranchised. It suited me well, though. Being angry and chaotic myself, London couldn’t have matched me more perfectly. From the lofty heights of my college in leafy Hampstead, I joined every campaign, protest and march, finding myself applauding Tony Benn most weekends at some rally or other in Trafalgar Square. What do we want? Er, student grants, no poll tax, freedom for Nicaragua, Nelson Mandela, Thatcher’s head on a pole…what was it this time? When do we want it? NOW! Two days before the dawn of the 1990s, I left London, smug and thankful that I was quitting this seething metropolis for a return to the safety of the Midlands. Paris was still on its elegant little pedestal in my mind, and I ranted at anyone who’d listen about its vast superiority, and that of France as a whole, over our mean-spirited little Tory island and its yuppie capital. Gradually, though, I fell in love with London all over again, seduced by its energy, its caprice, its sheer balls. One up, one down: the lustre of Paris was peeling, its Mitterand era chutzpah shrivelled into a matronly conservatism.
So many of the advances in cartography, as well as practically every other discipline, have stemmed from the ancient grudge and eternal competitiveness between these two great cities; it is a theme that reappears as the steadiest leitmotif through any analysis of modern maps and mapping. The victory in securing the world’s prime meridian for Greenwich was perhaps our literal high noon in the battle, which came at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC. Delegates from twenty-five nations gathered from the first of October, charged with finally settling the question that was dogging the world’s governments, and its transport and export industries.
Up until then, anyone anywhere could, and did, work to their own meridian. While the Equator is a fixed line of latitude—determined by its position at the centre of an oblate (i.e. polar-flattened) spheroid, its particular climate and the fact that its days and nights are of equal length the whole year round—the defining line of longitude, namely a full circle around the globe that connects the two poles vertically, can be placed anywhere. Establishing longitude was essential for navigation, especially at sea, but also for working out relative time zones. When the sun is overhead at noon in one place, 15° (i.e. 1/24 of 360°) west or east it is an hour different. Time was delineated in what might be called the way of the sundial, so that it was noon in any particular place when the sun was highest in the sky. Even in a country as tiny as Britain, this meant that there were numerous different local times in operation. With the advent of the railways, this had to change on a national basis, and soon, thanks to the massive upsurge in oceangoing trade, the need to standardise time zones between countries became acute, especially as there was a plethora of meridian lines being used by different countries.
The 1884 Washington conference came exactly a year after the 7th General Conference of the European Arc Measurement, held in Rome. It was at this geodetic gathering that the French had secured international agreement to use their metre as the global standard unit for measuring length. Their definition of a metre—one ten-millionth of the section of their meridian as it passed over the land between Dunkirk and Barcelona—had been achieved by impeccably scientific means that demonstrated to all the advanced nature of their geodetic powers. Using the line that passed through the Paris Observatory to calculate the metre also subtly cemented that meridian in the world’s consciousness, at a time when calls were becoming ever louder to create one super-meridian, from which all else would be calculated. To decide where that should be was the raison d’être of the Washington conference, twelve short months later. The French must have arrived in America feeling that the prevailing wind was well and truly in their sails.
Not for long, though. There had evidently been some anglophonic stitch-up going on behind the scenes between the host Americans and their British cousins. Use of the Paris Meridian to establish the world’s measuring stick was employed not in advocacy of its adoption as the Prime Meridian, but as a sly argument by the English-speakers against such an eventuality. After all, they cried, it’s someone else’s turn! You got the metre, now be a jolly chap and leave go the damned meridian, won’t you? Of course, the irony should not escape us that this Anglo-American pincer movement, so much of which depended on their reminding delegates of the recent French victory in measuring the world, came from two countries who have had as little to do as possible with the metric system ever since. Even today, the USA remains one of only four countries on Earth officially using imperial weights and measures (it’s an unlikely foursome: the others being Burma/Myanmar, Yemen and Brunei), and with its ever-growing ranks of metric martyrs, save-the-pint campaigners and kilometre refuseniks, it can hardly be said either that Britain has embraced the New (well, 1883) World Order.
At Washington, the French swiftly realised that no one else was going to support the Paris Observatory as the proposed site of the Prime Meridian, so they set about plan B, namely the standard fallback position that, if they weren’t to have the prize, they must do all they could to scupper the chances of the British. We would doubtless have done exactly the same in their tiny shoes. It wasn’t just the French performing beautifully to their own national stereotype: the conference minutes are a quite hilarious catalogue of every nationality living up to its most dastardly clichés. The Americans, swaggering into their role as world-leaders-in-waiting, were bullish, yet smarmy, and masters of manipulation, particularly of the easily flattered British. To that end, the Americans played the good guy, genial hosts with absolutely no self-interest in the process, while shooting across everyone’s bows at the very first session with a clear reminder of their latent muscle. The chairman of the US delegation, Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers, was elected President of the Conference. In his opening address, he declared:
Broad as is the area of the United States, covering a hundred degrees of longitude, extending from 66° 52’ west from Greenwich to 166° 13’ at our extreme limit in Alaska, not including the Aleutian Islands; traversed, as it is, by railway and telegraph lines, and dotted with observatories; long as is its sea coast, of more than twelve thousand miles; vast as must be its foreign and domestic commerce, its delegation to this Congress has no desire to urge that a prime meridian shall be found within its confines.
The minutes do not record if he expounded this while stroking a white cat in his lap.
Rodgers’ statement made clear where the host delegation were to place their support when it came to deciding the location of the Prime Meridian: Greenwich. Indeed, it was only on the second day of the conference that American delegate Naval Commander W. T. Sampson jumped the gun and formally proposed it, stating:
As a matter of economy as well as convenience, that meridian should be selected which is now in most general use. This additional consideration of economy would limit our choice to the meridian of Greenwich, for it may fairly be stated upon the authority of the distinguished Delegate from Canada that more than 70 per cent of all the shipping of the world uses this meridian for purposes of navigation.
The French delegation were horrified, and filibustered the proposal off the table, with a speech by their prime delegate, M. Janssen, the Director of the Paris Observatory, that culminated in his demanding more time to consider the question but which, to reach that point, took well over an hour as he pondered the enormity of the matter in hand. He voiced their opposition to Greenwich in the most tremulously righteous terms:
This meridian, instead of being chosen with reference to the configuration of the continents, is borrowed from an observatory; that is to say, it is placed on the globe in a hap-hazard manner, and is very inconveniently situated for the function that it is to perform…Instead of profiting by the lessons of the past, national rivalries are introduced in a question that should rally the goodwill of all…Since the report considers us of so little weight in the scales, allow me, gentlemen, to
