3 hours ago, Nobody Special said:

I always heard it as the amount that one guy with a team of oxen could plow in a day.

I have heard that as well. 

George, those measurements are if you are using English foot, they used to use the German foot that was a bit longer. 1 chain was 60 foot. 

2 of my favorite books are "Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End" by Ken Follet. A quick summery, a medieval guy named Tom Builder is looking for work and ends up building a Cathedral, he dies before completion and his son finishes it. Some parts talk about his tools and his most important are his rods he uses for measuring, laying out foundations, etc. Great books though i highly recommend, full of intrigue of the Church and politics of the time, and just the general people trying to live. The second book takes place about 100 years later. 

The closest i have come to cartography was laying out preplots, tank positions, obstacles, etc. so yeah not much. And surveying, very intriguing but i know next to nothing about. My dad however knows how to build roads and has done, i guess it was surveying, again i know nothing of how to build a road, but he could build a dang good road. 

George Washington was a surveyor. At the age of 17 he became a county surveyor in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln were also surveyors. 

There's an old fantastic Reader's Digest book, Back to Basics, that basically operates from the presumption that you want to survey land and build a farm from scratch, and there's a bit in there about how to use a card table or even make a plywood table to use as a plane table in a pinch.

And Washington was a surveyor - unfortunately it was one of his less scrupulous activites - after the Seven Years War (French and Indian over here) he was in charge of surveying and doling out land to veterans...and got himself an exemption as an officer to obtain his own parcels. A lot of the vets also found themselves with land, but almost no water access, so he would graciously buy them out at pennies on the dollar.

He also tried repeatedly to have roads built that went miles out of their way to pass directly in front of Mt. Vernon, and he did surveying under the Brits in the Ohio Valley when it was supposed to be hands off - then after a little light genocide by Mad Anthony Wayne, surprise - Washington held a lot of the best claims. On the other hand, the Pawnee/Shawnee wars were the reason for our first standing Army under Mad Anthony Wayne in 1791. Bill Bryson talked a bit about it, I think, and I know Hogeland did in Autumn of the Black Snake.

Probably the most "fun" mapping I have done is cave surveying.  It adds another layer to the fun when it is dark, cold, and wet and everything is in 3 dimensions.  These were the old analog days (today they use lasers) and the standard tools were Brunton pocket transits (aka a Brunton compass) and cloth tapes and make sure that your notebook has waterproof paper.

"Though your survey teams desert you and your stations wash away, keep you eye upon life's purpose and try to map a mile a day" (from a caving song)

3 hours ago, Nobody Special said:

after the Seven Years War (French and Indian over here)

For anyone who's interested in this conflict, I STRONGLY recommend Fred Anderson's Crucible of War, which not only gives a comprehensive description of the causes and progress of the war, but also a deep understanding of how almost everything that happened during and immediately following the subsequent American Revolution had its precursors and precedents in the earlier conflict. I listened to the audiobook on the Libby app and thoroughly enjoyed all twenty-nine hours.

Ahhhh, the venerable Brunton, we used the large folding version in the aluminum  case. Years later when Deb and I started cruising in her RV I wanted to be able to take sights and headings so I could follow along on the much dreaded by the GPS generation. . . MAP! <gasp> My old plotting compass was in very poor shape and the one I used to plot this acreage got stripped off the dozer back when. Soo after looking through the junk at the local big box stores and Sportsman's Warehouse I went online and bought a pocket Brunton. It's nowhere near what we used on the drill crew BUT it's far and away better than Wall Mart or any other big box's best. Not cheap at about $30 but it's a REAL compass, take sightings, shoot bearings, read the reciprocal, plot on maps, inclinometer you can sight or compare with. 

The real difference is we could lay the Bruntons we used on the crew on say a board or the hood of the truck to take measurements. This pocket version isn't in the large 90* aluminum case. That's okay don't need to do that anymore.

Okay, head slapping moment, I pealed it out of the rubber base to see if I could find the model name and viola! It's a Brunton Eclipse. While looking it reminded me there are 8 cards protected in the rubber case with express instructions on how to use the functions available. Say, open the mirror AND main case partway. It stands on edge braced on the case for shooting inclinations, levels, etc. And by coincidence the instruction cards are there flapping on the lanyard for your convenience.

I'm glad we drifted onto this tangent, I love this compass and am going to spend some time playing with it again. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Funny how a tangent can lead to a discussion of the tools for staying on course.

Tangents are a sine of the coarse IFI subjects often come around to / from.

Frosty The Lucky.

For years Bruntons were made by the Ainsworth Company in Denver, CO.  In the '70s the Ainsworth Company folded and all the rights were bought by the Brunton Company of Riverton, WY where they are made today.  Riverton is in west Central Wyoming, about halfway between Casper and the the Tetons.  I worked there as a geologist in the late '70s and early '80s.

I see that they are now making Bruntons in bright colors which may actually be an improvement because you may be less likely to leave it lying on an outcrop (the version which blows a siren and sends up flares if left unattended for a period of time is yet to come).

The geologist on our crew left his Brunton on the drill's track a couple times so he never had one more than a year or two old while I was on the crew. He REALLY heard about it when he left the camera on the tracks. The whole crew got a talking to about that the second time it happened and we were under standing orders to YELL LOUDLY if the geo put anything on the tracks.

I painted this one fluorescent orange, I hate losing compasses and this one was expensive. It is a greenish grey, I don't recall bright colors when I ordered it but I would've. It's not like I'm hiding.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

I just have my old Army compass. Need to get it out and play with it, been maybe 25 years since i have. 

When i was stationed at Fort Hood in 94 we were the first and test company for the M1A2 tanks. With them came the first gen of GPS. It was a box about 9"x7"x2" with a quarts screen on the side. You put in the coordinates of where you wanted to go and the screen had a little arrow that pointed right, left, forward, or back. 

We also were the first to have the SINGARS radio. It was a radio that hopped frequency IIRC 100 times a minute. The radios all synched together so they hopped to the same freq. The radio though was able to send and receive data. The commanders seat had a computer screen that you could upload a map to. You could then put all of the info on the map like avenues of approach, obstacles, pre-plots, objectives, friendly units by unit, known enemy units, etc., etc. Then hit a key and the radio would transmit all that data to the tanks that were linked in the network. This computer screen was also the commanders gun sites that were thermal. The sights were also independent of the gunners sights, if you ever seen an M1A2 that round thing in front of the loader is it. The gunner can be engaging a target while the commander is scanning another area. He can lock on a target and after the gunner engages, hit a buton. The gun swings over and puts the gunners sites on that target. While the gunner engages the commander is scanning elswhere. Taking out enemy armor now becomes how fast can the loader load the cannon. I could sling a round in 3.5 sec. 

Sorry i got a bit off the compass topic there. 

If anyone is interested in acquiring a Brunton compass there is a hack to do it on the cheap.  A new Brunton is about $660.  However you can buy a military surplus M2 compass for less than $100.  However, an M2 is calibrated in mils (6400 mils = 360 degrees).  But, you can send off the M2 to the Brunton Company to have the bezel ring replaced with one that is calibrated in degrees (either 360 or 4 quadrants).  The total cost will be a LOT less than the cost of new instrument.

The Brunton pocket transit was a highly regarded tool in the survey world back in the day. Now they are mostly collectors items.

GPS and robotic total stations have made the old methods obsolete. Gone are the days of compass and chain, of flagmen and survey parties.

One GPS unit replaces every survey tool in the truck and most of the crew. It has also replaced skilled surveyors -true field engineers -with point stakers, Guys that can use the software but would be lost without it. And its hard to find even them. 

True surveyors are a dying breed and becoming more valued every day. I am solicited regularly by companies and corporations and I turn down work every week. I pick and choose the jobs I want now - its a pretty good position to be in.

15 hours ago, Frosty said:

coarse IFI subjects

Coarse subjects are forbidden by the TOS.

2 hours ago, Rojo Pedro said:

GPS and robotic total stations have made the old methods obsolete. Gone are the days of compass and chain, of flagmen and survey parties.

One of the interesting things in the more recent seasons of the archaeology reality show "Time Team" is the use of GPS technology to map the site, locate individual finds, etc, all of which can be loaded up into the computer and overlaid with the geophysical scans (ground penetrating radar, etc) to give the archaeologists a very accurate idea of where to dig, what they've found, and what it all means. I'm always particularly pleased to see one particular team member named Henry Chapman working on this, as that was the name of my grandfather (the one born in Alaska in 1895) and those are my two middle names.

PS. What does a trigonometrician do with a loan? He cosines it!

yes. GIS changed surveying and the rest of the world as much as GPS really.

Amazing amount of info at your finger tips and every county out there has a GIS site to one degree or another. It is worth looking into as a home owner and can be quite a rabbit hole depending on the particular county/ city system available.

Couldn't ya just use a calculator and work from the mils (or knowing this group, a slide rule or possibly the oracle at Delphi)? 6400/360 is what, about 17.77 mils = 1 degree? They're not real mils anyway, they're artillery mils - the real one would be closer to 17.5. You already had to use trig to get the tangent elevation with an M2, a little more help wouldn't hurt. (although messing up the tangent elevation hurts a lot!)