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| A portrait of Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiralt |
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| Jorge Juan-Santalices's portrait. |
Source: The Maritime Voyage of Jorge Juan to the Viceroyalty of Peru (1735-1746). By Enrique Martínez-García (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) & María Teresa Martínez-García (Kansas University).
"One of the most famous scientific expeditions of the Enlightenment was carried out by a colorful group of French and Spanish scientists—including the new Spanish Navy lieutenants D. Jorge Juan y Santacilia (Novelda 1713-Madrid 1773) and D. Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giralt (Seville 1716-Isla de León 1795)—at the Royal Audience of Quito in the Viceroyalty of Peru between 1736 and 1744. There, the expedition conducted geodesic and astronomical observations to calculate a meridian arc associated with a degree in the Equator and to determine the shape of the Earth. The Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, immersed in the debate between Cartesians (according to whom the earth was a spheroid elongated along the axis of rotation (as a "melon")) and Newtonians (for whom it was a spheroid flattened at the poles (as a "watermelon")), decided to resolve this dispute by comparing an arc measured near the Equator (in the Viceroyalty of Peru, present-day Ecuador) with another measured near the North Pole (in Lapland). The expedition to the Equator, which is the one that concerns us in this note, was led by Louis Godin (1704-1760), while Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) headed the expedition to Lapland"...
Although such data had consequences for navigation and cartography, the motivation was not simply utilitarian. Also it was part of an intellectual revolution in which advances in mathematics were developed in parallel to philosophical disputes: some theories and postulates of the living and the dead stood to be elevated or disproved.
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