Akins Hollis English IV 2011-12 discussion

Chapter two shifts away from Krakauer and covers the history of Everest and famous expeditions. It begins in the year 1852, in Dehra Dun, India—the time and place the myth of Everest was born. It was in this year that India's surveyor general first calculated the height of Everest and realized that it was the tallest mountain in the world. Nine years after the height of Everest was first determined (and, based only on trigonometry, in 1852 it was calculated to within twenty-six meters of its actual height), Sir Andrew Waugh, India's surveyor general, named the peak Mount Everest, after the previous surveyor general, Sir George Everest.