waters was soon generously employed again, as the French and Spanish reminded delegates that their governments fully expected Britain and the USA to join the metric system, if not in a quid pro quo for the adoption of Greenwich, then certainly in the same spirit of global good manners and scientific unity. One of the British delegation, General Strachey, smoothly replied:
I am authorised to state that Great Britain, after considering the opinions which were expressed at Rome, has desired that it may be allowed to join the Convention du mètre…[and] that there is a strong feeling on the part of the scientific men of England that, sooner or later, she will be likely to join in the use of that system, which, no doubt, is an extremely good one.
In other words, we’ll get home and do precisely nothing about it for a century, but thank you so much for your concern. Stuff you with a smile, Monsieur.
The definitive vote on adopting Greenwich loomed, and the French made one last desperate bid to prevent it. The loquacious M. Janssen deferred to his colleague M. Lefaivre to make their final plea. ‘The meridian of Greenwich is not a scientific one,’ piped Lefaivre, ‘and its adoption implies no progress for astronomy, geodesy or navigation.’ It was only ‘convenient’, not scientific, a fact that
our colleague from Great Britain just now reminded us of by enumerating with complacency the tonnage of British and American shipping…Science appears here only as the humble vassal of the powers of the day to consecrate and crown their success. But, gentlemen, nothing is so transitory and fugitive as power and riches. All the great empires of the world, all financial, industrial and commercial prosperities of the world have given us a proof of it, each in turn.
This was the sound of grand nobility in defeat, for the vote was then taken and Greenwich confirmed as the world’s Prime Meridian by 22 votes to 1, with two abstentions. Only San Domingo (the island of Hispaniola) voted against, with Brazil and France abstaining. They didn’t want to look like sore losers. Or rather, they were saving that for later.
After further lengthy arguments about how to calibrate degrees from Greenwich, and how to calculate time zones, the French asked for another deferment of the conference. They returned six days later with a small bombshell of a proposition: that the metric system—which, they reminded delegates, everyone had spoken so voluminously in favour of—should be extended from the measurement of length, volume and weight and into the realms of degrees, angles and time. Greenwich might be getting the line through it, but at least the grid of longitude and the calibration of the day that spun off it might be expressed in a French way, or at least in a way that was guaranteed to piss off the Anglo-American alliance. The British and the Americans cried foul, that such a decision was beyond the remit of the conference.
Style over substance: the Paris meridian
For the first time in weeks, the French smelled English-speaking blood and pressed home their slender advantage, demanding a vote on whether or not a vote could be taken on the topic. It was close. Thirteen countries agreed that the issue of metricising time and angles could be considered; nine, Britain and the US included, voted against. Two abstained. So, as eager not to appear bad losers as had the French been on the Greenwich vote, the Americans and British then ostentatiously supported the metric system in the subsequent vote. In fact, no one voted against it—not that that made the faintest bit of difference in actually making it happen.
Flushed with their pyrrhic victory, the French demanded a further adjournment to the conference, which briefly reconvened two days later before its final adjournment, for nine days, in order that the conference protocols could be drawn up, in English and, of course, in French. On the first of November, a month to the day since the delegates had first gathered, the conference closed in a mutual orgy of back-slapping and vainglorious speeches about how the international community was united as never before and that they had made history. Thankfully, the sagging balloon of hot air was peremptorily pricked by the very last contribution noted in the conference minutes: the ever vocal M. Janssen of the French delegation complaining about the standard of French used in their translations.
As expected, the French reaction to the conference’s decision was to ignore it for as long as they possibly could. The Paris Meridian was still marked as 0° on French maps until 1911, and even beyond that, they kept refusing to refer to the notion of Greenwich Mean Time, preferring instead to name the concept the altogether snappier ‘Paris Mean Time diminished by 9 minutes 21 seconds’. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on: PMT has such an appropriate ring to it for matters of timekeeping. Even though the Paris Meridian has long been shunted into the sidings, the French still keep polishing it and showing it off to the world like a priceless relic. One of their main millennium projects was to plant lines of trees the entire length of France along their old meridian line. It might no longer be functioning, but hey, you could see it from space, or at least if you look closely enough on Google Earth in a few decades’ time. To a chippy Brit (and, when it comes to any dealings with the French, that’s most of us), the project smacked of dismissive looking down the Gallic nose at the lack of presentational flair that attends our meridian line.
The world’s timekeeping and cartographic staff it may be, but as the Prime Meridian enters Britain in the retirement town of Peacehaven on the Sussex coast, it’s marked only by a dowdy obelisk and the Meridian Centre, a deathly 1970s shopping mall with the unmistakable aroma of incontinence. Two hundred and three miles due north, it leaves English soil in similarly dreary fashion, on a beach just south of the Sand-le-Mere caravan park, near Tunstall on the Holderness coast of Yorkshire’s East Riding. Britain’s bleakest coast is also
Substance over style: where the Prime Meridian enters England at Tunstall, East Yorkshire
the fastest-receding in Europe, where houses and roads tumble regularly over the edge, leaving their forlorn traces to be washed over by a freezing sea the colour of a river in high flood. In the circumstances, the great local millennium project—placing a huge carved boulder on the cliff top to mark the point at which the global meridian arrives in its home country from the North Pole—was something of a triumph of optimism over experience. Instead of lasting the full thousand years, it managed just three, disappearing over the muddy cliff in a storm in January 2003. In between these two inauspicious gateposts, as well as the whistles and bells of Greenwich itself, the meridian is marked by a number of plaques, columns, archways and, in Cambridgeshire, a line of daffodils planted by Boy Scouts. It’s either disarmingly modest or just a bit crap. Either way, it’s British through and through.
If—and, frankly, it’s a bloody big if—we accept British pre-eminence in modern mapping owing to the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian as the gold standard for measuring lines on a map, then one event gave birth to this certainty. That was the creation of an earlier imaginary line on the landscape, the first precisely calibrated base line across a stretch of English countryside, from which all initial triangulations were taken to produce what soon became the Ordnance Survey. It took place in the summer of 1784, and for reasons that are also gloriously British: once again, a fierce spirit of one-upmanship against the French and a supremely thin-skinned paranoia that they were insulting us.
We had a lot of making up to do; by the late eighteenth century, French map-making was leagues ahead of that of its clod-hopping British cousin. Nearly a century earlier, their experiments in establishing accurate lines of longitude and latitude had proved that the world was an oblate spheroid, rather than a perfect sphere, which had tremendous impact on the precise measurement of relative distances, radically altering the shape
