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Mount Everest
The actual particulars of the event are unclear, obscured by the accretion of myth. But the year was 1852, and the setting was the office of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in the northern hill station of Dehra Dun. According to the most plausible version of what transpired, a clerk rushed into the chambers of Sir Andrew Waugh, India's surveyor general, and exclaimed that a Bengali computer named Radhanath Sikhdar, working out of the Survey's Calcutta bureau, had 'discovered the highest mountain in the world.' (In Waugh's day a computer was a job description rather than a machine.) Designated Peak XV by surveyors in the field who'd first measured the angle of its rise with a twenty-four-inch theodolite three years earlier, the mountain in question jutted from the spine of the Himalaya in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal.
Until Sikhdar compiled the survey data and did the math, nobody had suspected that there was anything noteworthy about Peak XV. The six survey sites from which the summit had been triangulated were in northern India, more than a hundred miles from the mountain. To the surveyors who shot it, all but the summit nub of Peak XV several was obscured by various high escarpments in the foreground, of which gave the illusion of being much greater in stature. But according to Sikhdar's meticulous trigonometric reckoning (which took curvature of the earth, atmospheric reinto account such factors as fraction, and plumb-line deflection) Peak XV stood 29,002* feet above sea level, the planet's loftiest point.
In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar's computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general. As it happened, Tibetans who lived to the north of the great mountain already had a more mellifluous name for it, Jornolurignia, which translates to "goddess, mother of the world," and Nepalis who resided to the south called the peak Sagarmatha, "goddess of the sky." But Waugh pointedly chose to ignore these native appellations (as well as official policy encouraging the retention of local or ancient names), and Everest was the name that stuck.
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