The spectrometer was used to observe the Raman Effect in action

It took 70 years, six surveyors, hundreds of workers, and thousands of miles on foot to complete the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. The survey was initiated in 1802 by an infantry officer, William Lambton, in the expanding reign of the East India Company, to chart a map of the British territory from then Madras to Mangalore. The outcomes of this survey are relevant and indispensable even today: the map of the Indian subcontinent as we know it, the exact size of the Earth, the height of the Himalayan giants — Everest, K2 and Kanchenjunga — and other such scientific data, all came from this historical survey.