Delambre was born in Amiens, France. In collaboration with Pierre Méchain, his greatest achievement was the measurement of the length of the meridian between Dunkerque and Barcelona. This portion of the meridian, which also passes through Paris, was to serve as a basis for the calculation of the length of the quarter meridian, connecting the North Pole with the Equator. The expedition lasted from 1792 to 1799. Its purpose was to establish a universally accepted foundation for the definition of the metre, which was to be defined as 1 / 10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
JEAN BAPTISTE JOSEPH DELAMBRE (1749-1822), French astronomer, was born at Amiens on the 19th of September 1 749.
Here Delambre observed and computed almost uninterruptedly, and in 17 9 0 obtained for his Tables of Uranus the prize offered by the academy of sciences, of which body he was elected a member two years later.
The first consul nominated him inspector-general of studies; he succeeded Lalande in 1807 as professor of astronomy at the College de France, and filled the office of treasurer to the imperial university from 1808 until its suppression in 1815.
He struggles to distinguish between the curious and telling (for example, Delambre was denounced during the Terror for lacking an "abhorrence of kings") and the curious yet inconsequential (after Delambre had supervised Descartes's reburial in 1819, Sweden sent France a skull, wrongly claiming it was the philosopher's).
Delambre and Mechain were savants - Enlightenment thinkers, investigators of a world they believed would be revealed to be perfectly constructed.
Delambre realised that Mechain's measurements were inevitably flawed because the natural world is flawed.
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