X was the 6th Surveyor General of India (1830-1843) & was part of the 70 year ‘Great Trigonometric Survey’ to map out of the entire Indian subcontinent. He was known for his pioneering work & detail orientation.
Such was his reputation that when his successor Andrew Scott Waugh found a remarkable (now globally known) landmark in the region, he said it had to be named after X.
Can you identify X or the landmark named after him?
Tag: History
[116]
In his 1631 treatise Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, Dutch physician and explorer Jacobus Bontius wrote, of a tribe he’d encountered in the jungles of what is now Indonesia, that “the Malays informed him that the X could talk, but preferred not to, lest they be compelled to labor.”*
Bontius’ mention of X was the Western world’s first introduction to the name of this tribe, a word that passed from Dutch to Portuguese to English and is still used today in slightly modified form – ironically, even speakers of modern Malay and Indonesian use the European corruption of the name, even though its etymology lies in Old Malay.
Who are the X?
*Considering Bontius was there as part of a Dutch East India Company expedition, this was probably a very good idea.
[94]
In the 1800s, with Britain’s Industrial Revolution in full swing, English workers and craftsmen began to find themselves in increasingly tight competition with the advanced mechanization and factories that enabled mass production of goods, combined with underhanded labor practices implemented by the top bosses in control of those factories to squeeze out as much product as possible.
Naturally, some of them expressed their resentment by going on a violent rampage against the machines that were destroying their livelihoods. Most legendary of these was “X”, who as the tale would have it, smashed two knitting frames in “a fit of passion” — an action that would result in his name being used for the entire movement. The name is still used today to refer to individuals who find themselves particularly opposed to modern technology and its ubiquity.
Who is X?
[92]
Santa Maria delle Grazie (“Holy Mary of Grace”) is a lovely, if initially unassuming, 15th-century terracotta-stone church and convent located in Milan, Italy. While every brick of the church is rightly regarded as an architectural and artistic jewel, there’s something special about the north wall in the dining hall that led to the building’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
On the night of August 15, 1943, an Allied aerial strike partly destroyed the site — that north wall was one of the few left standing, having been protected since the start of World War II by sandbags and scaffolding.
Why is that wall so important?