Comparative Table of the Highest Mountains, Waterfalls and the Longest Rivers on Earth, 1830.
The chart shows that not all the mountains in Himalaya were fully surveyed and measured in 1830. Back then, Dhaulagiri (now number seven) was considered to be the highest mountain on Earth. Mount Everest (also known as Sagarmāthā in Nepal or Chomolungma in China) was identified as the highest mountain by the Indian surveyor and mathematician Radhanath Sikdar in 1852.
The chart also shows that the world’s longest rivers were not yet fully explored in 1830. The Nile, now officially identified as the second longest river in the world, kept its stream unexplored for a long period of time. It was not until the late 1850s when Victoria Lake was established as the stream of the White Nile. A good example of how surveys have progressed since 1830 is the Brahmaputra River, which on this chart is shown as the 9th longest river in the world, whereas today it is listed as 29th.
Similarly, the height of the world’s highest waterfalls, the Angel waterfalls in Venezuela was not identified until 1949. The novel “Icarus”, by the Spanish author Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa, tells the fascinating life-story of Jimmy Angel, an aviation pioneer and personal pilot to Lawrence of Arabia, who travelled South America in the 1930s and revealed the Angel Falls to the outside world in 1933.
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