Editing George Everest (section)

==Biography==
[[File:G Everest grave Hove.jpg|thumb|upright|Everest's grave, [[St Andrew's Church, Church Road, Hove|St Andrew's Church, Hove]]]]
Everest was born on 4 July 1790, but his birthplace is uncertain.<ref name=r1>"George Everest was born on 4 July 1790 but the location is open to doubt. This uncertainty as to his birthplace arises because his father William Tristram Everest had an estate near Crickhowell in south [[Wales]] and some reference works suggest he was born there. [...] George's baptismal certificate certainly indicates that he was baptized in Greenwich but although the certificate also bears his date of birth it does not indicate the locality." {{cite book|last=Smith|first=James R.|chapter=Sir George Everest|editor-last=Martin|editor-first=Geoffrey|title=Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, Volume 15|year=2015|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=9781474226653|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w3skCwAAQBAJ}}</ref><ref>Salkeld, Audrey ([[American Alpine Club]]) - [https://books.google.com/books?id=OLij19S1ftAC&pg=PA71 The American alpine journal]. 32.1990. p. 71. {{ISBN|1933056371}} Retrieved 18 November 2017</ref> He was baptised at [[St Alfege Church, Greenwich|St Alfege Church]] in [[Greenwich|Greenwich, London]], on 27 January 1791.<ref>{{cite web |website=Parks and Gardens UK |url=http://www.parksandgardens.org/places-and-people/site/8302/history |title=Gwernvale Manor Hotel |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171201041914/http://www.parksandgardens.org/places-and-people/site/8302/history |archive-date=1 December 2017 |access-date=18 November 2017|url-status=dead}}</ref> He was born either at Greenwich or at Gwernvale Manor, his family's estate near [[Crickhowell]], [[Brecknockshire]] (now part of [[Powys]]) in [[Wales]].<ref>Ahluwalia, H. P. S. (2001) [https://books.google.com/books?id=lLvPiyCNTnwC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13 The Everest within]. Hemkunt Press. p. 13. {{ISBN|8170103096}} Retrieved 18 November 2017</ref><ref>[[BBC]] (7 March 2000) [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/669629.stm Celebrating Wales on top of the world].</ref> 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.<ref name=r1/>

Everest was educated at the [[Royal Military College, Sandhurst|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<ref name=jrs/>). He was commissioned as a [[second lieutenant]] in the [[Bengal Artillery]], and sailed for [[India]] in the same year.<ref name=odnb>
{{cite ODNB|id=9003|title=Everest, Sir George|last=Baigent|first=Elizabeth}}</ref>

Everest was a [[Freemason]]<ref name=jrs>{{cite journal |last1=Smith |first1=James R. |title=Sir George Everest, F.R.S. (1790-1866) |journal=Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London |date=1992 |volume=46 |issue=1 |pages=89–102 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/531442 |issn=0035-9149}}</ref> and initiated on an unknown date unknown 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.<ref name="Gila Valley">{{Cite web |url=http://gilavalleylodge9.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/freemasons-and-the-royal-society/ | title= Freemasons and the Royal Society | date= 28 June 2010 | publisher= Gila Valley Lodge No 9|access-date=25 February 2018}}</ref>

===Early career in India===
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 [[British Java|Java]] in 1814, where Lieutenant-Governor [[Stamford Raffles]] appointed him to survey the island.<ref name=jrs/> 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 {{convert|400|mi|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|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]].<ref name=odnb/>

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]].<ref name=odnb/>

He became acquainted with Indian thought, according to his niece Mary Boole:<ref>{{Cite book|last=Mary Everest Boole|url=http://archive.org/details/indianthoughtwes00bool|title=Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth Century|date=1901|publisher=The Ceylon National Review|others=Library Genesis|language=English}}</ref>
{{Blockquote| My uncle, George Everest, was sent to India in 1806 at the age of sixteen.&nbsp;[...] the boy went out ignorant, un-spoiled and fresh. He made the acquaintance of a learned Brahman who taught him—not the details of his own ritual, as European missionaries do, but—the essential factor in all true religion, the secret of how man may hold communion with the Infinite Unknown.}}

It is very likely he introduced Indian thought to others as well:

{{Blockquote| Some time about 1825, he came to England for two or three years, and made a fast and lifelong friendship with [[John Herschel|Herschel]] and with [[Charles Babbage|Babbage]], who was then quite young.(.) My uncle returned from india. He never interfered with anyone's religious beliefs or customs. But no one under his influence could continue to believe in anything in the Bible being specially sacred, except the two elements which it has in common with other sacred books: the knowledge of our relation to others and of man's power to hold direct converse with the unseen truth.}}

===Surveyor General of India===
In June 1830, Everest returned to India to continue his work on the GTS, and was simultaneously appointed [[Surveyor General of India]]. The arc from Cape Commorin to the northern border of British India was finally completed in 1841, under the supervision of [[Andrew Scott Waugh]]. To his dismay, much of his time was spent on administrative concerns, as well as combating criticism from home. The East India Company had provisionally appointed Thomas Jervis as Everest's successor, and Jervis subsequently delivered a series of lectures to the Royal Society on the perceived deficiencies of Everest's methods.

In response, Everest penned a series of open letters to [[Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex]], the society's president, in which he lambasted the society "for meddling in matters of which they know little". Jervis withdrew from consideration, and Everest successfully secured the appointment of his protégé Waugh as his successor. He resigned in November 1842 and his commission was formally revoked in December 1843, at which point he returned to England.<ref name=odnb/>

===Later life===
In London on 11 November 1846 Everest married Emma Wing, aged 23, of [[Hampstead|Hampstead, London]].<ref>{{cite web |title=St George, Hanover Square 1846-1847 |url=https://www-ancestryinstitution-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/search/collections/61867/records/90884013 |publisher=Ancestry.com |language=en}}</ref> They had six children.<ref name=jrs/>

In 1847, Everest published ''An Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India'', for which he was awarded a medal by the [[Royal Astronomical Society]]. He was later elected to fellowship of the [[Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland|Royal Asiatic Society]] and the [[Royal Geographical Society]]. Everest was promoted to [[colonel]] in 1854, made a [[Commander of the Order of the Bath]] in February 1861,<ref>{{London Gazette|issue=7097|page=289|city=e|date=1 March 1861}}</ref> and created a [[Knight Bachelor]] in March 1861.<ref>{{London Gazette|issue=22493|page=1241|date=19 March 1861}}</ref> He died at his home in [[Hyde Park Gardens]] on 1 December 1866, and was buried in [[St Andrew's Church, Church Road, Hove|St Andrew's Church, Hove]] near [[Brighton]].<ref name=odnb/>