Reuben Burrow

His other major achievements included a study of Indian mathematics, although he earned a reputation for being rude and unpolished amid the leading figures in science who came mostly from the upper-class.

[1] In 1774, Burrow and William Menzies aided Maskelyne in his observations in the Schiehallion experiment, to examine the deflection by gravity of the plumbline towards the mountain.

Soon afterwards, however, he was appointed ‘mathematical teacher in the drawing-room at the Tower,’ where there was then a training school for artillery officers, afterwards merged into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

It was started by Thomas Carnan, in opposition to the Ladies' Diary, published by the Stationers' Company and edited by Charles Hutton and like it included mathematical puzzles.

Watson recommended him to Lord Townsend as a good candidate "to teach mathematics to the Cadets of the drawing room" of the tower.

In 1777 he worked on a survey of the coast "from Naze in Essex to Hollseby bay in Sussex" (actually Suffolk) to assess vulnerabilities to attack by the French.

Soon after reaching India he wrote to the Governor-General Warren Hastings, a school friend of Maskelyne, stating his desire to generate more money in order to conduct further research.

In 1788, William Roy suggested that Burrow would be ideally qualified to conduct experiments in Bengal to examine trigonometrically to measure a meridian of the arc.

Burrow had obtained instruments used by the late Colonel Thomas Dean Pearse (1741–1789) and began his measurement of a baseline near Calcutta in 1791.

From his observations a length of a meridian arc along the Tropic of Cancer was later determined by Isaac Dalby as 362,742 feet, or 68.70 miles (105.64 km).

A Short Account of the late Mr. Burrow's Measurement of a Degree of Longitude and another of Latitude near the tropic in Bengal was published posthumously by his friend Isaac Dalby in 1796.

[5] Burrow wrote crude poems and a few written pseudonymously lampooned Maskelyne and nearly all his mathematical peers other than William Emerson who had taught him briefly.