biography
| name: |
Maury, Matthew (Fontaine)
|
pronunciation:
[mawree]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1806–73)
|
| biography:
| Oceanographer, born in Spotsylvania Co, Virginia, USA. He entered the US Navy (1825) and spent the next nine years on worldwide sea voyages. In 1839 a stagecoach accident left him permanently lamed and, considered unfit for active duty, he was appointed superintendent of the Naval Observatory's Depot of Charts and Instruments (1842). There he compiled information from numerous ships' logs, and gained an international reputation for his research in navigation, oceanography, and meteorology. By interpreting the crossing of the trade winds at the equator, he designed shipping routes which shortened an Atlantic-Pacific crossing by 40 days. In his most famous work, The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), he proposed a transatlantic telegraph cable to be constructed on a level sea-floor plateau he had discovered between Newfoundland and Ireland. In 1861 he became a commodore in the Confederate Navy, and while working to perfect underwater mines, he went to Europe where he also purchased and outfitted cruisers for the navy. After a brief self-exile in Mexico and Europe (1865–8), he returned to the US to teach at the Virginia Military Institute (1868–73). He is known as the ‘Pathfinder of the Seas’. |
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