He traveled to Germany, Italy, and France to visit major observatories from 1732 to 1735
It is a fact that he traveled to Germany, Italy, and France to visit major observatories from 1732 to 1735. Celsius traveled extensively in the early 1730s, visiting most of the main European observatories in Germany, Italy, and France. He proposed measuring an arc of the meridian in Lapland in Paris. In 1736, he took part in an expedition planned by the French Academy of Sciences to measure a degree of latitude, directed by the French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698-1759). The French Academy of Sciences (French: Académie des sciences) is a learned institution formed in 1666 at the proposal of Jean-Baptiste Colbert by Louis XIV to support and defend the spirit of French scientific study. It was one of the first Academies of Sciences and was at the forefront of scientific discoveries in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a mathematician, philosopher, and writer from France. On the invitation of Frederick the Great, he became Director of the Académie des Sciences and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science.
The trip's goal was to measure the length of a degree along a meridian near the pole and compare the results to a previous voyage to Peru, which is now in Ecuador near the equator. The missions supported Isaac Newton's theory that the earth's shape is an ellipse flattened toward the poles.
