Astronomer Royal for Scotland, a serious observational astronomer who pioneered high-altitude astronomy from Tenerife, and the founder of pyramidology.
The pyramid inch
Following John Taylor, Smyth held that the Great Pyramid of Giza encoded divinely revealed measures and prophecy, and that its unit of construction was a sacred inch, very close to but not identical with the British inch. He went to Giza in 1865 and made the first careful modern survey of the monument, published as Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. When the Royal Society declined his work he resigned his fellowship.
Why he is the origin of two traditions at once
The measuring tradition and the numerological one both start with him, and they separated in a single act: Flinders Petrie went to Giza in 1880 explicitly to test Smyth’s theory, with a father who was one of Smyth’s followers, and his survey refuted it. Petrie’s measurements are the ones Christopher Dunn builds The Giza Power Plant on, and they exist because a man went to check a numerological claim. The pyramid-inch commensurabilities that recur through the alternative literature are Smyth’s method, and the objection to them is the one Petrie made: with enough dimensions and enough constants, matches are cheap.
Connections
Flinders Petrie · Great Pyramid of Giza · The Giza Power Plant · Christopher Dunn · Giza Power Plant Theory · Howard Vyse · Ancient Machining · Core No. 7