The luxury yachts that anchor in Barcelona, owned by half world magnates, still live today in the Port Vell with about twenty fishing boats. They separate a small spring, the fishermen, chaired by the clock tower, an old lighthouse that has witnessed the last millennium room of the port, but above all of one of the great milestones of the history of science: the creation of the subway as a unit of universal measure.
From this Wednesday, Barcelona can already walk through the fishermen’s dock, which has later reopened closed to citizens. The port of Barcelona has remodeled part of the borerade, where the new lonja and the ice palace are located, and has eliminated the fences that prevented the passage to neighbors and tourists.
The intention is that soon you can also climb to the clock tower and show the city from this emblematic enclave. As did in 1792 the French scientist Pierre Méchain to complete the calculations on the Paris meridian, a method used to establish for the first time the length of the subway. And as it is believed that he would do so in the mid -nineteenth century Ildefonso Cerdà, who is said to be the first major urban planner in the world, to frame the Eixample project. Both are samples of how this bidding has involuntarily starred in the city’s past.
“Despite being little known, the clock tower is a symbol for the port and for Barcelona,” summarizes Joan Alemany, historian and economist specialized in port planning. In 2022, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the construction of the building, he was in charge of police station in which he reviewed his career: from its construction in 1772 to his – until today – inaccessible location.
The lighthouse that illuminated the metric system
In its beginnings, and due to its lighthouse function for one of the extensions of the port, it was called Torre de la Lantern. From its height a Barcelona was observed that has nothing to do with the current one. The walls that still imprisoned the city were divided. Also the newly released neighborhood of Low Casas de la Barceloneta. And instead of sports ships and fishing, says Germany, the landscape filled the frigates and corvettes that fed trade with America.
That scenario was the one that stepped on the French expedition with the commission of the Academy of Science of France to establish a universal unit of length that ended the regional chaos of measurements. In which it would end up being one of the great legacies of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, it was proposed that this unit, the subway, was the tenmillonieth part of the distance between Ecuador and the North Pole. But for this the meridian had to be measured, and to make the extrapolations the Mathematics and Geodestas French Jean Baptiste, Joseph Delrembo and Pierre Méchain chose the route of the Paris meridian – today relegated by Greenwich’s – between Dunkerque and Barcelona.
Méchain assumed the calculation of the southern half of the layout, but his passage through Barcelona was everything but pleasant, according to historian Ken Alder in The measure of all things. The seven -year odyssey and the hidden error that transformed the world. He arrived in the city with his assistant in June 1792, but shortly after, in January 1793, the war between Spain and France broke out after the decapitation of Louis XVI. In addition, he suffered an accident that kept him convalescent for half a year or more.
All made Mechain’s work. “They considered it half a spy and although they did not imprison him, he was not allowed to go up to Montjuïc measurements for a while,” says the historian Alemany.
To make its calculations, Mechain used an invented tool for this, the Borda repeater circle. The method was to measure the distances between three high points on the ground, whose triangulation then allowed to calculate the meridian line. Initially, Alemany recounts, the French Geodesta did the work from the Montjuïc Castle Tower and two nearby mounds in Vallvidrera and Alella. But war and accident altered their plans, and began to look for life through the city.
From his hostel room, the golden Fontana, began to make triangulations with Montjuïc Castle and a third point: the lantern tower. Also between those last two and the Cathedral of Barcelona.
The French sage, who would die in 1804 in Castellón de la Plana – where triangulations with the Balearic Islands – lived enough to see how in 1799 the decimal metric system based on its expedition was officially adopted in France. The same as the units such as the kilogram or the liter, which was adopted in Spain in 1853 and that in 1889 the General Conference of Weights and Measures set as a global pattern.
By Barcelona, although who knows if they also went up to the tower of the flashlight, other scientists passed to check or complete the calculations of the meridian. Among them the mathematician François Arago, who ended up imprisoned in Palma in 1808, or the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who also stayed in 1799 in the golden Fontana.
A vertex for Ildefonso Cerdà
The Torre de la Lintera, that lighthouse that would be useless with the expansion of the port in the mid -nineteenth century, was once again a decisive point for the calculations of another wise: Ildefonso Cerdà. Although there is no documentary proof that the urban planner who designed Eixample to the tower, historians assume that it is most likely to plan to plan the urban growth of Barcelona beyond its walls.
Because? The answer is in the current urban mesh of Barcelona and on the maps he included in his Theory of the construction of cities, In 1859. To order the expansion of the city, the urban planner drew two avenues, one that coincided with the 41º22’3’N parallel (the parallel avenue), and another with the 2nd 2nd11”e meridian (Meridian avenue). Both are perpendicular and would converge in a specific point of the city, the old lighthouse that today is the clock tower, also forming a rectangle triangle with the Gran Via and that would have the other two vertices in Plaza España and Plaza Glòries.
“Being Cerdà such a meticulous person and that he measured with extraordinary precision, nobody believes that it is a coincidence that the meridian and parallel cross exactly in the tower,” Reason the historian Alemany.
Beyond the eixample grid, another of the district’s identity, its chaflanes in each corner, also obey the same geometry. All of them are parallel to the parallel avenue or the meridian. That is why Alemany jokes that it is impossible to get lost in Barcelona. Without maps or mobile by hand, one can always be located in any of the hundreds of chaflanes of the center and orient towards one of the four cardinal points with exact precision.
With the entrance to the twentieth century, the tower was about to be demolished, although it was finally preserved for patrimonial reasons and that was when the clock that gives it name was installed. Its utility became the time. Now it will be to remember Barcelona and tourists that one day the city witnessed one of the greatest feats of science.
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