150 years of the International Association of Geodesy

摘要

At the invitation of the Prussian General Johann Jacob Baeyer, representatives of the states of Prussia, Austria and Saxony met in 1862 in Berlin to discuss Baeyer's "Proposal for a Central European Arc Measurement". By the end of that year, 16 nation states had agreed to participate in the project: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, seven German states (Baden, Bavaria, Hannover, Mecklenburg, Prussia, Saxony, Saxe-Gotha), Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. The IAG counts this international scientific initiative, and the organisation it spawned, as its origin. The primary motivation was to encourage national cooperation for a practical geodetic project, with the outcome being improved reference frame and geoid knowledge to support continent-wide mapping.