Article #236
Subject: Andrew Ellicott
Author: Bill Morton
Posted: 9/1/2014 02:36:02 PM

I, too, am interested in Andrew Ellicott. I saw some material you wrote about him and wonder where you
got your information. He seems to be a fascinating person who has done much for the new USA and yet
there is very little written about him.
Thank you

Article #237
Subject: reply
Author: Andrew W. Harrell
Posted: 9/1/2014 03:50:31 PM

Yes, Bill,



At the end of the historical timeline on the website's main pages are some of
the references I used. The main one of course is the Journal of Andrew
Ellicott which was transcribed several years later by West Point Cadets
after he returned from his mapmaking journey down the Mississippi around
1798. It contains the results of the calculations of the measurements he took
on that trip using the astronomical formulas that he and one of his mentors
the U. of Pennsylvania founder Robert Patterson (who was another early US
mathematician. If you are interested in mathematical astronomy you might want
to read the papers on how to calculate the aberration of starlight in order
to better determine the longitude at which his astronomical observations were
taken. These were reviewed by of all people Benjamin Franklin, a cofounder of
the APS, and use the ancient formulas of spherical trigonometry which are
taught in many college courses nowadays and their proof is even harder to
look up. They anticipate some of the same formulas Albert Einstein famously
to calculate the effects of light having a finite speed on mass and energy.
In my book I have tried to supply some of the missing details of his
calculations and these proofs. It is still being reviewed by some people at
the history and theology departments at Vanderbilt. It is about 300 pages on
all the different national explorerations in the Us South from 1690 to 1810
and is the result of 25 years of collecting information about him and others
since Col Cameron (later promoted to Brig. General) who was also interested
in this subject came to work with me in Washington in the early 1980s and got
me started studying him. There are a lot of grammatical and syntactical
errors in the text and if you have any additions or suggested corrections to
the material posted there I would appreciate it. It may take a few days to
activate your account since I haven't had a discussion board user in 5 months
now and the web code I wrote often doesn't work the same after a few months
of every body changing their compilers and link up databases. But, I can
manually enter it into the database if I have to and you should be able to
post questions in a week or two.



Best, Sincerely,



Andrew Harrell



LTC USAR EN (ret.)