George Everest

Sir George Everest, CB, FRS, FRAS, FRGS (/ˈiːvrɪst/, EEV-rist; 4 July 1790 – 1 December 1866) was a British surveyor and geographer who served as Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843.

After a military education, Everest joined the East India Company and arrived in India at the age of 16. He was eventually made an assistant to William Lambton on the Great Trigonometric Survey, and replaced Lambton as superintendent of the survey in 1823. 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 (1,500 mi), a task that took from 1806 to 1841 to complete. He was made Surveyor General of India in 1830, retiring in 1843 and returning to England.

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. Andrew Scott Waugh, his protégé and successor as surveyor general, had been responsible for putting his name forward in 1856. Everest's name was used as a compromise due to the difficulty of choosing between multiple local names for the mountain. He initially objected to the honour, as he had had nothing to do with its discovery and believed his name was not easily written or pronounced in Hindi.

Everest was born on 4 July 1790, but his birthplace is uncertain. He was baptised at St Alfege Church in Greenwich, London, on 27 January 1791. He was born either at Greenwich or at Gwernvale Manor, his family's estate near Crickhowell, Brecknockshire (now part of Powys) in Wales. Everest was the eldest son and third of six children born to Lucetta Mary (née Smith) and William Tristram Everest. His father was a solicitor and justice of the peace, part of a "Greenwich family of long standing", and was successful enough to acquire a large estate in south Wales. His grandfather John Everest, the son of a butcher, was the first in the family to enter the legal profession. The Everest family in Greenwich can be traced at least as far back as the late 1600s, when Tristram Everest–John's great-grandfather–was a butcher in Church Street.

Everest was educated at the Royal Military College in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, followed by a year at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, the military engineers' and artillery training college. He joined the East India Company as a cadet in 1806 (before he had reached the required age of 16). He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Bengal Artillery, and sailed for India in the same year.

Everest was a Freemason and initiated on an unknown date in Neptune Lodge, Penang, under the authority of the United Grand Lodge of England. After returning to England, he joined Prince of Wales' Lodge, London, on 20 February 1829.

Little is known about Everest's earliest years in India, but when he first arrived in the country at 16 years old he showed a talent for mathematics and astronomy. He was seconded to Java in 1814, where Lieutenant-Governor Stamford Raffles appointed him to survey the island. Everest returned to Bengal in 1816, where he improved British knowledge of the Ganges and the Hooghly River. He later surveyed a semaphore line from Calcutta to Benares, covering approximately 400 miles (640 km). Everest's work came to the attention of Colonel William Lambton, the leader of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), who appointed him as his chief assistant. He joined Lambton at Hyderabad, India in 1818, where he was in the process of surveying a meridian arc northward from Cape Commorin. He was responsible for much of the fieldwork, but then in 1820 contracted malaria, necessitating a period of recovery spent at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

Recovering from malaria, Everest returned to India in 1821. He succeeded Lambton as superintendent of the GTS upon Lambton's death in 1823, and during the following years extended his predecessor's efforts on the arc up to Sironj, in present-day Madhya Pradesh. Everest was prone to suffer from poor health, however, and the effects of a bout of fever and rheumatism left him half paralysed. He returned to England in 1825, where he spent the following five years recuperating. During that time, Everest was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1827. Most of his free time was spent lobbying the East India Company for better equipment and studying the methods used by the Ordnance Survey; he frequently corresponded with Thomas Frederick Colby.