biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1730–87)
|
| biography:
| Astronomer, known for the ‘Mason–Dixon Line’ in the USA. As an assistant at Greenwich Observatory, with the English surveyor Jeremiah Dixon (d.1777), he observed the transit of Venus at the Cape of Good Hope in 1761. From 1763 to 1767 Mason and Dixon were engaged to survey the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and end an 80-year-old dispute. They reached a point 224 mi W of the Delaware R, but were prevented from further work by Indians. The survey was completed by others, but the boundary was given their name. |
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