, west London. In 1843, Everest retired and recommended that Waugh was the best replacement for the position of Surveyor General. Waugh surveyed the Himalayan region. The survey covered nearly 1690 miles from Sonakoda to
Dehradun. The great height of this area, however, combined with its unpredictable weather, meant that few useful sightings were obtained before 1847. In an era before the
electronic computer, it then took many months for a team of humans to calculate, analyze and extrapolate the
trigonometry involved. According to accounts of the time, it was 1852 when the team's leader of the human computers,
Radhanath Sikdar, came to Waugh to announce that what had been labeled as "Peak XV" was the highest point in the region and most likely in the world. Sikdar and Waugh checked their calculations again and again in order to make no mistake in them and then sent a message to Royal Geographical Society from their headquarters in Dehradun, where they found that
Kangchenjunga is not the highest peak of the world. Everest had always used local names for the features he surveyed, and Waugh had continued the practice. In the case of Peak XV, Waugh argued that with many local names for the mountain, it was impossible for him to identify the name that was most commonly used.
Hodgson argued that the native name for it was Deodanga. Another suggestion was that the peak was what
Hermann Schlagintweit had identified as Gaurisankar. Though Everest himself objected, the name "Mount Everest" was officially adopted by the
Royal Geographical Society several years later. The height of Mount Everest was calculated to be exactly high, but was publicly declared to be in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of was nothing more than a rounded estimate. Waugh is therefore wittily credited with being "
the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest". Waugh noticed errors in the triangulation that appeared to be due to the attraction of the plumbline to the Himalayan mountains and approached the clergyman mathematician Archdeacon
John Henry Pratt with the problem. Pratt studied the problem and came up with the idea of
isostasy. Plaudits followed soon after Waugh's identification of Mount Everest. In 1857, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its
Patron's Medal and the following year he was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society. Three years later, in 1861, he attained the rank of Major General and was replaced as Surveyor General by
Henry Thuillier. ==Later life==