Cotopaxi, where portions of Traité du navire where written

The metacenter, used even today to determine ship stability

In 1735 the French Navy and the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition to Peru to help verify the true shape of the Earth.  It was known that Earth was not a perfect sphere; but scientists did not know if it was elongated or flattened at the poles, so navigators could not precisely locate ships at sea.  On the 10-year expedition, the astronomer Pierre Bouguer and his colleagues marched down the mountains of the Andes measuring the length of a degree of latitude at the equator.  While on this extraordinary odyssey, Bouguer wrote Traité du navire (Treatise of the Ship) the first book of naval architecture which set down the scientific rules of ship design, including the metacenter as a measure of ship stability.    Bouguer and his book form the centerpiece of Ships and Science.