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he could not possibly have been aware that his rod that beat once per second was essentially three kush in length – just a whisker less than one and a half metres (remembering that the metre had not been invented at that time).
    The three-kush rod behaves exactly like a double-kush pendulum and therefore it beats 240 times during one 360 th part of a day; observable by watching Venus move across a 360 th part of the sky. Jefferson was therefore accidentally re-enacting the ritual used by Sumerian astronomer priests nearly 5,000 years earlier and connecting with the principles of prehistoric measurements.
    The units that Jefferson identified from this ancient process were all based on the length of this ‘seconds rod’. He wrote:
    ‘Let the second rod, then, as before described, be the standard of measure; and let it be divided into five equal parts, each of which shall be called a foot; for, perhaps, it may be better generally to retain the name of the nearest present measure, where one is tolerably near. It will be about one quarter of an inch shorter than the present foot.
    Let the foot be divided into 10 inches;
    The inch into 10 lines;
    The line into 10 points;
    Let 10 feet make a decad;
    10 decads one rood;
    10 roods a furlong;
    10 furlongs a mile.’

    We can see that his proposed ‘decad’ was based on a double-seconds rod. It was equivalent to six Sumerian kush, and his furlong was equal to 600 kush. This brings about an even deeper connection with the people of ancient Iraq because they used a system of counting that was sexagesimal; which means it used a combination of base ten and base sixty. They had a system of notation that worked as follows:
Step
multiple
Value
1.
1
1
2.
x 10
10
3.
x 6
60
4.
x 10
600
5.
x 6
3,600

    It can be seen that the figure of 600 is indeed a Sumerian value for a Sumerian unit of length.
    But not only is the Jefferson furlong equal to 600 kush – it is also an almost perfect 360 Megalithic Yards.
    Strangely, Jefferson had connected well with both the Megalithic and the Sumerian system. But something even stranger happened when we took Jefferson’s furlong and multiplied it by 366 and 366 again:
    366 2 furlongs = 39,961.257km

    As we have already mentioned, the range of assumed lengths of the Earth circumference varies by a few kilometres depending on what source one consults, probably because each cross section will differ and tides and plate tectonics involving mountains leave room for some debate. At the higher end 40,008 kilometres is widely used, however if we take NASA preferred figures they quote a polar radius of 6,356.8 kilometres which equates to a polar circumference of 39,941.0 kilometres.
    That means that 366 2 Jefferson furlongs match Nasa’s estimate of the Earth’s size to an accuracy of 99.95 per cent – which is as perfect as it gets!

Problems with Foucault’s pendulum
    We became more and more fascinated by everything to do with pendulums. During one particular telephone conversation, which had gone on for over an hour, we had, yet again, discussed at length the idea that there might be some unknown law of astrophysics – that was revealed by pendulums – at work here. We considered some highly speculative thoughts that ranged from standing electromagnetic sine waves due to a gyroscopic effect of the Earth’s spin through to gravitons containing packets of information about ‘geometrical shape’. But we agreed that we just did not know enough to even start to investigate such ideas. Chris wrote the following paragraph into a draft of this chapter as a summary of our mutual frustration and finished work for the day.
    ‘We have to admit that we still do not understand why it is so, but the use of pendulums in association with these ancient values appears to be elemental to the planet Earth – some physical reality seems to be at work here. Every pendulum reacts to the mass of the Earth but there seems to be some kind of ‘harmonic’ response at certain