NB: To anyone with any historical Info!
Freddo Frog
The other day I was given an assignment at school (I'm in grade 12,
Australia) to report the changes in surveying over the last 50 years. HELP!
Its due next week and I dont know anything about surveying. I would be
greatly appreciated if anyone could let me know of any sites that contain
any historical records of technological advances in surveying that have
occured in the last 50 years. Anything......... please.
(reply to newsgroup or to ashe...@one.net.au with 'Freddo' in the subject
line, thanks)
Freddo
Cliff Mugnier - University of New Orleans
good place to start in your own country, and the developments will make more
sense when placed in the context of familiar place names.
--
Clifford J. Mugnier (cj...@uno.edu)
The Topographic Engineering Laboratory
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans, Louisiana 70148
Voice and Facsimile: (504) 280-7095
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jerrya
"SLIDE-RULES and SPACE SHIPS"
Presented at the 1992 ASPLS/ACSM Convention in Anchorage, Alaska
Prepared by Jerry A. Anderson PLS
The mosquitos were bad and the white-socks worse as my cousin and I hacked
our way through the alder thickets with double bitted axes. We cursed the
occasional nest of wasps we encountered, while my uncle and my father would
laugh from the relative safety of being 150' behind us on the line we had
cut.
It was 1959, I was thirteen years old, my cousin two years older. The
sagebrush of the New Mexico desert had done little to prepare us for the
task of surveying our homesteads in Alaska.
The nearest monument was two miles away, and with an army compass and 100'
of hemp rope stretched between two hiking staffs, we located five homestead
entries near the headwaters of Stariski Creek, on the Kenai Peninsula. Thus
began my long association with defining, locating and marking the
territorial boundaries claimed by various sorts of humans who inhabit (or,
depending on your outlook, infest) the earth.
In 1965, after an extended European vacation, courtesy of my Uncle Sam, I
returned to Alaska unemployed and broke. A former school mate invited me to
go to work with him. Doing what? I inquired. Surveying, he replied. Gosh, I
exclaimed, (having successfully repressed the memory of the yellow-jackets
and the amused uncles) I don't know anything about surveying!" "That's OK,"
he assured me, "we'll be working for the State Highway Department! You
don't have to know anything! and so I embarked on the path that would lead
me to eventually join the ranks of the professional Land surveyor.
The following Monday I reported to the project office of the Alaska
Department of Highways, was assigned to a crew, and sent to the field. When
the truck stopped, the Party Chief said "Anderson, get
the chain." Well, I figured right off that this guy had better be more of a
Surveyor than he was truck driver. - Heck, it didn't look to ME like we were
stuck - but I wanted to do well on my first day on the job, so I rummaged
through the back of the truck looking for the tow chain.
I suspect that most of us here could tell similar tales.
Reflect for a moment, if you will, on your own training and education and
preparation for the profession of land surveying. If your experience was
like mine, it went something like this - After going to work in a job where
I didn't need to know anything about surveying, I got my first shot as an
instrument man because they needed another crew, and I had three weeks
experience as a chainman. I was made a party chief two months later for
the same reason.
I received little actual training by a registered land surveyor, instead I
was thrown into the position, and if I could bluff my way through long
enough to actually find out what the job required, then I was successful.
Two things pulled me through - a lot of good text books mixed with barrels
of midnight oil to teach me the Trade, and a few old moss- back instrument
and chainmen who took the time to teach a young fellow the "tricks of the
trade".
They taught such things as "a long chain measures short", and "a minute off
line is a foot & a half in a mile" and "your chain can be a foot off line
before your distance is off by a hundredth"
They taught me to set up a stiff-leg K&E Paragon in the swamp and turn an
acceptable angle without altering my stance. They taught me about extended
back-sights for a two-foot jog in a traverse line, and how to quarter point
a curve. They taught me how to scribe a bearing tree, and set references
where the cat-skinners just might miss them!
Mostly tho, they taught me about such things as honesty, integrity, pride in
my work, and respect for the surveyor who had gone before you. I learned
that you never erase in a field book, that you never re-copy your notes, and
that you never move the other fellows monument, or shave five seconds off
your last observed angle to make your closure look a little better. The
old "Code o' the Hills" was petty loose when compared to the character and
principles of a surveyor.
In the late 70's I visited Mount Vernon, home of that famous surveyor,
George Washington. It was with a certain amount of pride that I examined
the tools of his trade. A slide rule and book of logarithms, a transit and
a chain, a piece of linen and a set of adjustable pens.
Why, I was familiar with all of these devices, and could have easily removed
them from the museum, conducted a survey, computed the traverse and the
acreage, and drawn the final map. Conversely, when I was a new party
chief, George Washington could have joined the crew and immediately been a
productive member of the team, no learning curve required!
But how things have changed! I recall my first Curta mechanical calculator!
I could use natural functions, not log tables! I could swiftly perform an
area calculation or derive a square root! Surely I had died and gone to the
surveyors heaven! But wait, there was more! Electro-tapes! It took a unit
on each end of the line, required a big man to carry the transceiver and a
smaller fellow to carry the 12-volt car battery, and each unit was the
price of a new cadillac! But a distance across the canyon could be measured
and reduced within 10 or 15 minutes, just don't try to include legs of less
than 1/4 mile in your traverse and still expect the 1:20,000 closure that
was our personal standard.
In just a few short years we have come to the point, that for the price of
just one new cadillac you can buy an automated total station that,
unattended, will track the rodman and measure distance, direction and
elevation upon demand from remote commands issued by the rodman. Three
dimensional coordinates are instantly generated, and the whole thing can be
down-loaded into the office computer, and a finished plat produced before
the rodmans boots are dry.
Perhaps some of you, like I do, feel more kinship with Old George than you
do with the young hotshot with a GPS receiver strapped to his belt.
MIGAWD!! You can measure HOW CLOSE??? by using SPACESHIPS?? Surely, Rip Van
Winkle would not be as awe-struck as a young George Washington would be if
he were assigned to a modern day survey crew!
But please, fellow Surveyors, colleagues and friends, lets not be too quick
to abandon the old skills, talents, standards and values that have served
our profession so nobly for generation upon generation.
The theme of this conference is "DATA BASED DECISIONS", and we must not lose
sight of the fact that good decisions and practices are based upon ALL the
data that is available, including appropriate tools and procedures for the
job at hand.
Surely, no surveyor in his right mind would attempt to conduct a survey of
any size using a chain instead of an EDM. Who would compute even the
simplest subdivision with a slide-rule and log tables when at least an
HP-41 is readily available. Does anyone draft a set of construction plans
any more without a CAD station?
We are guilty of errors of a similar magnitude when we re-set a monument by
measuring half a mile with an EDM instead of carefully slicing away layers
of sod to find the rust-column of a long since disappeared pipe that was
called for in the deed.
We abandon centuries of tradition and volumes of statute, case and common
law when we set "new" monuments that do not perpetuate the location of
long held and accepted positions, in order to satisfy the expedient of
"straightening out" a street centerline, or "making it fit the plat or the
deed better".
We are derelict in our duty when we fail to firm-up a section corner that
hasn't been visited for many years, or when we are in such a hurry that we
don't take new accessories or verify the old ones. We border on
malpractice when we let a tight budget prevent us from properly marking
bearing trees and filing a monument record with the District Recorder.
If we set a pipe or a rebar with no identification as to the nature of the
corner, or who established it, or when it was set, we project the impression
(correctly) that we must be a little ashamed of the work we do.
Is it any wonder that our public image has suffered when so many have let
their pride in the profession of surveying degenerate to the level of just
knowing which buttons to push on the data collector? Or how to bid the job
six bucks cheaper than the fellah down the street?
There's still a need for slide rules, timber-scribes, compasses and pocket
tapes. We will always need to know how to compute a traverse by latitude
and departure, and we need to be able to tell when our computer gives us
answers that an old moss-back would immediately recognize as being beyond
the limits of reality.
My relatively short career as a surveyor has spanned centuries of change. In
thirty years, we have moved from slide-rules to spaceships, from the
methods and tools used to map this nation by Washington and Jefferson to
the exploration of the galaxy by James Kirk and Jean Luc-Picard, who are no
longer a science fiction story, but rather a vision into the future.
I pay credit to the old moss-back surveyors who molded and shaped my vision
of the past and future, Alaskan Surveyors like Bob Mitchell, Lefty Howard,
Leo Smith, Al Harris, Maurice Ozwald, Bill Mendenhall, Henning Johnson and
Ken Branch - but especially to my friend George Schwaderer, who painfully
convinced me early in my career that if we don't have time to do it right,
we'll have to make time to do it over.
So lets re-commit to using ALL of the tools and knowledge available to us,
both the vision of our children and the wisdom of our fathers- and let's
never forget the solemn warning given several millennia ago by Moses in the
Old Testament at Deuteronomy 27:17, wherein he warned:
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark.
And all the people shall say, AMEN!"
Freddo Frog wrote in message <379c5...@pink.one.net.au>...
John Crickmore
Freddo,
what are you after?
Drop me a line or check out our web site at http://www.isaust.org.au and see
if there is anything there that could help.
Regards
John Crickmore
john_cr...@isaust.org.au
The Institution of Surveyors, Australia
Freddo Frog <dash...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:379c5...@pink.one.net.au...
x
1800's