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blue plaque · Scotland

Blue plaque № 59558

Photograph at the Blue plaque № 59558 blue plaque

In the summer of 1774 the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne FRS, Astronomer Royal, set up observatories on either side of Schiehallion to measure by how much plumblines would be pulled out of the vertical towards the mountain by the gravitational force due to its mass, at the time, this was called 'The Attraction of Mountains', in effect, it became the first determination of Newton's Universal Gravitational Constant. The mountain was surveyed by Reuben Burrow of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The calculations were made by the mathematician Charles Hutton FRS, during which he was the first to use land surface contour lines, now universally employed in map making. This plaque was set up by the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society in 1982, the 250th anniversary of Maskelyne's birth.

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

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