An Account of Experiments to Determine the Figure of the Earth by Means of the Pendulum Vibrating Seconds in Different Latitudes

By the early nineteenth century, it was widely accepted that gravity varied at different points across the Earth's surface, and that the Earth could not be perfectly spherical. This 1825 work documents the groundbreaking experiments of Edward Sabine (1788–1883), the first physicist to produce accurate measurements of this ellipticity.