On two days in 1761 and 1769 hundreds of astronomers pointed their telescopes towards the skies to observe a rare astronomical event: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. United by this momentous occasion, scientists from around the globe came together to answer the essential question: how can the universe be measured?

Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the author of The Brother Gardeners (longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award), The Founding Gardeners and the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and many others. She lives in London.