Fascinating subject.
I feel someone should make a long-form, James Burke Connections style piece on how mountain gravity was measured and how it fits in with history.
The label on the tin might say, "While surveying the Allegheny mountains in 1772, surveyors encountered a systematic error they could not explain, and took a side track into the developing theory of gravitation to resolve it." It ties together Newton, Cavendish, Mason and Dixon, the Royal Society, mountains on two continents, the mass of the Earth, and the fields of astronomy, geology, physics, and surveying.
