British surveyor and geographer George Everest died #OTD in 1866.
Everest was largely responsible for surveying the meridian arc from the southernmost point of India north to Nepal, a distance of about 2,400 kilometres, a task that took from 1806 to 1841 to complete. In 1865, the Royal Geographical Society renamed Peak XV – at the time only recently identified as the world's highest peak – to Mount Everest in his honour. via @wikipedia