Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Antonio de Ulloa
Summary
Antonio de Ulloa (12 January 1716 – 3 July 1795) was a Spanish naval officer, scientist, and administrator. At the age of nineteen, he joined the French Geodesic Mission to what is now the country of Ecuador. That mission took more than eight years to complete its work, during which time Ulloa made many astronomical, natural, and social observations in South America. The reports of Ulloa's findings earned him an international reputation as a leading savant. Those reports include the first published observations of the metal platinum, later identified as a new chemical element. Ulloa was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1746, and as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1751.
Ulloa served the Spanish Crown as governor of Huancavelica (1758–64), in Perú, and superintendent of the quicksilver mines in the region. Following the defeat of France in the Seven Years' War, Ulloa was appointed as the first Spanish governor of Louisiana in 1766. His rule was strongly resisted by the French Creole colonists in New Orleans, who expelled him from the city in the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768. Ulloa continued to serve in the Spanish Navy, achieving the rank of vice-admiral and becoming its chief of operations.
Antonio de Ulloa was born in Seville, Spain, into an aristocratic and intellectually distinguished family. His father, Bernardo de Ulloa, was noted for his writings on economics. His brother Fernando would become an engineer and the chief of works of the Canal de Castilla. Destined for a naval career, at the age of thirteen Antonio embarked in Cádiz on the galleon San Luis, bound for the port of Cartagena de Indias (in present-day Colombia). After returning to Cádiz, Antonio entered the Real Compañía de Guardias Marinas (the Spanish Naval Academy) in 1733.
At that time the French Academy of Sciences was organizing a major scientific expedition to Quito, in present-day Ecuador, in order to measure the length of a degree of meridian arc (i.e., latitude) at the equator.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.