Alexander Thom - A Forgotten Genius
Our original quest had nothing at all to do with Washington DC. We were trying to rescue the reputation of a man by the name of Alexander Thom. He was a Scot and was born in 1894. Thom would eventually become Professor of Engineering at Oxford University but outside of his career he had another interest. Thom was fascinated by the standing stone circles and avenues of Britain and France. He believed they had been constructed with astronomy in mind and so he set out to study and survey as many of them as he could.
For fifty patient years Alexander Thom, together with his friends and family, travelled all over Britain and to Brittany in France, carefully measuring these ancient treasures from the Stone Age and Bronze Age. He was able to prove just how carefully most of the sites had been laid out and confirm that there was an astronomical component to their creation. But Thom discovered something else. It sounded unlikely at the time but Alexander Thom became certain that most, if not all, the Megalithic monuments had been planned and laid out using the same unit of measurement. It was a unit that was 82.97 cm in length and Thom called it the Megalithic Yard.
Experts thought the Megalithic Yard must be nonsense. After all, how could such primitive people have dreamed up such a precise linear unit? And even if they had, how could they have kept it so accurate across nearly two thousand years and thousands of square miles? They said it was an impossibility but Thom wasn't interested in speculation. He was a scientist and so he kept on measuring and he kept finding the Megalithic Yard right up to his death in 1985.
It seemed to us that there must be something in the Megalithic Yard because the statistics of fifty years of work proved there was. So we set out in our first book to try and discover whether the Megalithic Yard was real, where it had come from and how it had been passed on from site to site and generation
to generation.
For fifty patient years Alexander Thom, together with his friends and family, travelled all over Britain and to Brittany in France, carefully measuring these ancient treasures from the Stone Age and Bronze Age. He was able to prove just how carefully most of the sites had been laid out and confirm that there was an astronomical component to their creation. But Thom discovered something else. It sounded unlikely at the time but Alexander Thom became certain that most, if not all, the Megalithic monuments had been planned and laid out using the same unit of measurement. It was a unit that was 82.97 cm in length and Thom called it the Megalithic Yard.
Experts thought the Megalithic Yard must be nonsense. After all, how could such primitive people have dreamed up such a precise linear unit? And even if they had, how could they have kept it so accurate across nearly two thousand years and thousands of square miles? They said it was an impossibility but Thom wasn't interested in speculation. He was a scientist and so he kept on measuring and he kept finding the Megalithic Yard right up to his death in 1985.
It seemed to us that there must be something in the Megalithic Yard because the statistics of fifty years of work proved there was. So we set out in our first book to try and discover whether the Megalithic Yard was real, where it had come from and how it had been passed on from site to site and generation
to generation.
Civilization One - An Integrated Measuring System
In our first book together, Civilization One, we explained how the Megalithic Yard was made. It was quite straight forward really. The Megalithic engineers used a simple pendulum and an observation of the planet Venus during certain parts of its cycle to create a string length that was equal to exactly half a Megalithic Yard. Because the most important thing about this was the turning Earth, which is constant, and because pendulums always behave in the same way, the Megalithic Yard could be expected to be as near perfect as possible on any site where it was used. We were pleased that we had vindicated Alexander Thom but this was just the beginning of the story. The Megalithic Yard proved to be far from a stand-alone unit. As it turned out it was just one part of a fantastic way of viewing the Earth, it's size, mass and its orbital characteristics. The Megalithic Yard, together with its companion measurements, the Megalithic inch and the Megalithic Rod, were simply the linear units for a system of measurement that encapsulated time, space, distance, volume and mass. What is more, the whole system was tied absolutely to the dimensions of the Earth, because underpinning everything was an amazing type of geometry that is no longer used in the world (Well only by a very few people and we will go into that later.) Megalithic GeometryThe ancient peoples who built the Megalithic monuments relied on a geometry that had 366 degrees to a circle. It sounds odd but it's not really because this geometry was based upon the length of the Earth year. And when one views the rising and setting of a star, there are indeed 366 days in the Earth year, or at any rate the star rises and sets 366 times in a year.
To them, each degree could be split into 60 smaller units, which we know as minutes of arc, and each minute of arc could be split again, this time into 6 smaller units, which are seconds of arc. If this is done across the surface of our planet an amazing thing happens. In terms of the polar circumference of the Earth, which they used exclusively, one Megalithic second of arc would measure 366 Megalithic Yards. The whole system is suffused with genius. It's so simple, and yet so accurate. Fine, we hear you say, but what has this got to do with Washington DC? A good question and one that deserves a good answer. But first of all you will need to know what made us look at Washington DC at all. |
