Have Surveyors Always Used Meters?

[+PFF]

Hi, Gang:

 

I received this question from one of the people with whom I share my finds--a local engineer who designs electrical substations.

 

The mark in question is a granite monument, EZ-5145, dating from 1853. There is a description next to it written by a Surveyor Historical Society. Therefore, the wording may not date from the mid-1800's. But it's still a good question: Have surveyors always used meters?

 

Any input will be relayed back to my friend. Thanks.

 

-Paul-

 

Something surprises me about this mark. The elevation is given in meters!? (see the second image, to the right of the long/lat) I would not have expected this on a mark from the mid 1800s. I'm a bit shocked to see anything other than English (dare I say British) units. I would not has been surprised to see the units of furlongs or some other archaic unit. Was it common to use meters? How might that have come about? I though meters was a more modern unit.

Edited February 2, 2005 by PFF

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

Well I can not remember the Name of the Science Commision where Thomas Jefferson and the Science Community moved the Observing line to Greenwich in the 1800's nor the specific date but I am sure this is when the meter became the standard for the Measurement.

Thomas Jefferson Link

It also had something to do with the chronometer from an Oservance at the Royal Observatory.

Some more History

 

I will try to find the exact content of which I (speak)write.

 

The METER History.

METER

Edited February 2, 2005 by GEO*Trailblazer 1

[+BuckBrooke]

Meters have been around at least since Napoleon, in 1792. Here's a great story about the foibles, reality and errors of surveying, and its ties to astronomy during the creation and definition of the meter:

http://www.kenalder.com/excerpts.htm

[+Team Wampus]

Are you asking about land surveyors in general? I've seen lots of deeds here in the mountains of East Tennessee that have units of measure such as rods, chains, and links. One old engineer I worked for back in the 1970's still had his survey chain. My favotite deed descriptions go something like: "Starting from a 12" oak on the corner of John Smith's property, about xyz rods southwest to a white rock beside the creek; thence up the holler to the ridgetop; thence meandering along the ridge northeasterly about xyz rods to an old fencepost; thence to the beginning." Gee...makes you wonder how property disputes ever come about!

[+Harry Dolphin]

Ah, Team Wampus! Been there, done that. We did some title searching on a piece of property in upstate New York. All of the deeds, from 1835 (when refugees from Shay's Rebellion filtered into the area) to present are in links and chains. "Northeasterly x chains y links along a stone wall to an old stump..." If it were an old stump in 1835, imagine what it is now!

[+TeamThompson]

One of my absolute all time favorite trivia questions: What country was the second , after France, to adopt the Metric system as its official measuring system? The answer is the United States of America.

 

I don't know the year, but it was a lot further back than most would imagine.

 

Cheers,

Bruce.

[SWMG]

Found it.

 

1805 The United States was given an iron copy of the standard meter bar and a brass copy of the standard kilogram mass.

Twelve copies of the archive meter were made of iron under the direction of J.G. Trallés, of the Helvetic Republic and a member of the committee responsible for the archive meter (le mètre étalon) and archive kilogram (le kilogramme étalon). Copies in brass were also made of the archive kilogram.. A copy of each of these was given to Ferdinand R. Hassler, who had been selected by President Thomas Jefferson to conduct the first survey of the east coast of the United States. The iron copy of the archive meter became known in the U.S. as "the committee meter" and the brass copy of the archive kilogram became known as "the committee kilogram". Hassler sold these to a member of the American Philosophical Society who stored them with the Society. Later, Hassler borrowed these as needed and used the committee meter as the reference for the surveys conducted by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. It and the committee kilogram were used by the Survey for other scientific work as well from 1807 to 1893.

[+BuckBrooke]

But, it wasn't adopted by the US as its official measuring system; Jefferson didn't support it in the end and the government didn't adopt it. We've never had the meter as official distance measure.

[ArtMan]

The venerable history of the System Internationale notwithstanding, I strongly suspect the measurements on that datasheet were originally in feet, and that the metric equivalent was added some time later.

 

-ArtMan-

[SWMG]

1832 The United States Department of the Treasury adopted yard, avoirdupois pound, gallon, and bushel standards.

In 1830 the Senate directed that a survey of the situation be made and this task was passed to F.R. Hassler, Superintendent of the Coast Survey. As expected, he found that the weights and measures used in various ports differed from each other significantly, though their average values appeared to agree well with the values used in England. He filed a preliminary report in 1831, followed by a final report in 1832, and Congress finally directed that something be done by the Secretary of the Treasury.4

The Secretary of the Treasury (under whom the Coast Survey office worked) settled upon standardizing on the yard, pound, gallon, and bushel in use in England at the time of the American Revolution. In 1815, Hassler had bought a yard scale made by Troughton of London in 1814. This Troughton scale would later serve as a U.S. standard yard, from 1832 to 1857, when it was superseded by the Bronze Yard. The pound selected was the pound avoirdupois and was scaled up from the troy pound used by the mint by the factor of 7000/5760, those two numbers being in terms of the grain, which remains the unit of mass common to both pounds. The gallon selected was the Queen Anne wine gallon, most commonly used in the United States at that time and used in Great Britain until 1824. The bushel selected was the Winchester bushel, which appears to date back in England to the time of Henry VII. The size attributed to this bushel in the United States was 2150.42 cubic inches based on the average of the American port survey results. As it turns out, the Winchester bushel used in England had been set at 2148.28 cubic inches, so right from the start the American bushel differed from even the old English bushel. At the time they were selected, the gallon and bushel selected were no longer used in Great Britain, though they had been at the time of the American Revolution. Thus, the nonmetric standards in the U.S at this time were not "Imperial" as many Americans today tend to believe. Imperial measures in Great Britain were not established until 1824, after the American Revolution.4, 14

[+jwahl]

Metric system was made legal in the U.S. in 1866 (not mandatory, but legal to use), there was a rush to try to metrify the U.S. starting in 1975 (Metric Conversion Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-168) and at about the peak of that activity was 1991-95 (Executive Order 12770, Metric Usage in Federal Government Programs). about the time that this plaque was placed. However I think NGS and C&GS may have darn near always used meter, but would have to do some digging to verify.

 

- jlw

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

THE WHOLE LIST

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

Taking the text as a whole some one in my opinion may have taken literary authority on this.

If you use a Surveyors Chain =66' feet that is.

You can not come up with a measurement of meters unless it is converted to meters from feet.

 

just my .02

[Z15]

fyi

 

foot

 

A measure of length in the English-speaking world; since the 12th century, the foot has been legally defined as one-third of a yard. Since 1959, one foot = 0.3048 meter exactly; see yard and below.

 

The foot is only roughly the size of a human foot. The median foot of American males (as many smaller as bigger) is 10.4 inches long, and the female median is an inch smaller. Even 17-year old U.S. Army trainees have a median foot length of only 10.6″, and 95% of them have feet smaller than 11.2″.

 

The most recent change in the length of the foot was the result of an agreement among the English-speaking countries to eliminate discrepancies between their customary measures. The United States implemented the agreement by an announcement in the Federal Register on July 1, 1959 (“Refinement of Values for the Yard and the Pound”), and since then in the United States the foot has been the international foot = 0.3048 meter exactly. Since the United States is now almost the only country still using the foot, the name has become something of a joke.

 

U.S. Survey foot

The United States uses a different foot for one activity. When the United States adopted the international yard in 1959, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, mappers of the nation, objected that converting all their geodetic data to international feet would be a horrendous undertaking. They were authorized to continue to use the previous definition of the foot, that of the Mendenhall order (U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Bulletin 26, April 5, 1893), one foot = 1200/3937 meter.

 

This foot is now known as the U.S. Survey foot, = 1.000 002 international feet, and is used only for land measurements.

 

The State Plane Coordinate System of 1927 was published in a unit of measure identified as the "U.S. Survey Foot." By 1959, except for surveying and mapping applications, the United States had switched to the unit of measure identified as the "International Foot."

(In 1983) the U.S. Survey Foot was specified in 11 states and the International Foot was specified in 6 states. In all other states the meter is the only referenced unit of measure in the SPCS 83 legislation. The remaining 19 states do not yet have any legislation concerning SPCS 83.

Because SPCS 83 is presently published by NGS only in meters, many surveyors, mappers, engineers, and LIS users are converting these metric values to feet. [..] there have been instances where the conversions were done using the wrong conversion factor or the computation was otherwise done incorrectly.

 

History

The metric system was developed during the French Revolution in the late 1700's. It was first promoted in the United States by Thomas Jefferson and in 1866 the US Congress offically recognized the metric system as a legal system of units. In 1893, the Office of Weights and Measures (now the National Bureau of Standards), fixed the value of the U.S. "yard" in terms of the meter as follows:

 

1 yard = 3600/3937 meter or 1 yard = 0.914 401 8288 meter

this relation is equivalent to:

 

1 foot = 12/39.37 meter or 1 foot = 0.304 800 609 6012 meter

 

Unfortunately, other nations used a slightly different conversion factor. To solve this deviation, a refinement was made in the definition of the yard to bring the US yard and the yard used in other countries into agreement. In 1959 the national standards laboratories of the English-speaking nations agreed to standardize the relation between the yard and the meter as follows:

 

1 yard = 0.9144 meter

1 foot = 0.3048 meter

1 inch = 25.4 millimeter

 

The new length of yard is shorter by exactly two parts in a million.

 

At the same time it was decided that any data in feet derived from and published as a result of geodetic surveys within the U.S. would remain with the old standards (1 foot = 12/39.37 meter) pending any further decisions. This foot measurement is called the U.S. Survey foot.

 

This then, is how we came to have two values for foot-meter conversions. One value, (1 foot = 12/39.37 meter), should be used when converting a measurement that is based on geodetic surveys. The other value, (1 foot = 0.3048 meter), should be used for any other conversions that are not related to geodetic data. Whichever value is used, it should be used consistently thoroughout that project.

Edited February 5, 2005 by elcamino

[+Neweyess]

My favotite deed descriptions go something like: "Starting from a 12" oak on the corner of John Smith's property, about xyz rods southwest to a white rock beside the creek; thence up the holler to the ridgetop; thence meandering along the ridge northeasterly about xyz rods to an old fencepost; thence to the beginning."  Gee...makes you wonder how property disputes ever come about!

In reading the older comments from the datasheets you are reminded that these are historical documents with interesting tidbits about our past. Of course, not everything in our history is commendable. Just today I ran across the following 1935 entry in FY1100:

 

"IN THE WEST WALL OF THE SOUTHERN RAILWAY PASSENGER STATION, 1 FOOT NORTH OF THE ENTRANCE TO THE WHITE WAITING ROOM, AND 5 FEET ABOVE THE PAVEMENT."

 

Gary

[noticon75]

In reading the older comments from the datasheets you are reminded that these are historical documents with interesting tidbits about our past. Of course, not everything in our history is commendable. Just today I ran across the following 1935 entry in FY1100:

 

"IN THE WEST WALL OF THE SOUTHERN RAILWAY PASSENGER STATION, 1 FOOT NORTH OF THE ENTRANCE TO THE WHITE WAITING ROOM, AND 5 FEET ABOVE THE PAVEMENT."

 

Gary

Those descriptions are actually quite common. Looking back in some of the old surveyors notes calls to section corners often referd to n*****head rocks. I thought you were refrenceing an NGS datum in Here in Kanas as there is one here with a very similar description.

Edited February 6, 2005 by bluexj89