rouault
commented
3 years ago Yeah, a treasure hunt ! I think that Foucaut, without l, is the correct spelling in that instance. There are indeed quite a few known French men with Foucault name, with l, including the one of the pendulum experiment you quoted (Léon Foucault) or more recently the philosopher Michel Foucault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault). Although if you ask to the random French guy about Foucault, they will think to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Foucault :-)
But here, it seems this is "Henri Casimir Auguste De Prépetit Foucaut"
First hint I found was on https://bl.ocks.org/Fil/4db96f1250ad6118290e24d62e67187d which has a references to "Capitaine De Prépetit Foucaut, Notice sur la construction de nouvelles mappemondes et de nouveaux atlas, pp. 5-10, Arras, France, 1862." But googling for that name doesn't lead to interesting results. But the second reference to "Coup d'oeil historique sur la projection des cartes de géographie, M. d'Avezac - 1863." leads to its digital version at Bibliothèque Nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6574475p and at page 11 of that document they mention: "Le capitaine du génie Henri-Casimir-Auguste DE PRÉPETIT FOUCAUT, dans une Notice sur la construction de nouvelles mappemondes et de nouveaux atlas de géographie, lithographiée à Arras en 1862, s'est occupé spécialement de la projection de la mappemonde entière dans ce dernier système"
mwtoews
Compare the two:
FoucaultFoucautOnly 2 is used in PROJ (e.g.
fouc), and I'm 99.5% certain it is a typo that should be spelled as 1. I suppose this is named after Léon Foucault?Similar to #2701, this is a decades old typo embedded in
PROJ_HEAD, etc.(Yes, I'm working on a general spelling PR, but am individually creating issues for prominent typos that may require cross-referencing, and yes I intend to fix these too.)