Category Archives: History

End Of An Era

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I got news a few days ago that the last class of Army topographers (today they are called Geospatial Engineers) has graduated from the NGA College at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.  The course will be moved to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri in November.

This graduation, which took place on August 2nd, marks the end of Army Engineer training of any sort at Fort Belvoir.  It is the end of an almost 100 year presence at Belvoir, which openend in 1915 as an Army Engineer training ground and was originally named Camp A. A. Humphreys.

Fort Belvoir was always the traditional home of the Engineers.  It housed not just the Engineer School but also the offices of the Chief of Engineers and several key Engineer labs, including the Engineer Topographic Lab which today is designated the Army Geospatial Center.

At one time all Engineer officer training took place at Fort Belvoir (I attended my Engineer Officer basic and advanced courses there) but over time most Engineer enlisted training was moved to Fort Leonard Wood, which offered more training and maneuver space.  However, all formal topographic engineer training, for both officer and enlisted, remained at Fort Belvoir at the Defense Mapping School.

In the late 1980s the Chief of Engineers made the decision to move all Engineer training – officer and enlisted – to Fort Leonard Wood.  The decision was no surprise; the Engineers had been talking about it for years.  Still, it was sad to see the them vacate their traditional home.

As part of the move I know the Engineer School looked at ways of moving the Defense Mapping School to Leonard Wood, or at least relocating all Engineer topographic training to the new school.  The move didn’t take place for several reasons, but two key issues kept topographic training at Belvoir.  First was the fact that most of the courses were actually Joint classes – students from all military services, Department of Defense civilians and even a small population of foreign students were all mixed together in the same classes.  The other services and the Department of Defense liked the idea of having the training offered in the Washington D.C. area.  Apparently only the Army Engineers think central Missouri is an appealing locale. The other issue was equipment.  In the 1980s and well into the 90s much of the training at the Defense Mapping School involved the use of heavy base plant equipment like large printing presses.  Even the Army was still using large, heavy Heidelberg SOR offset presses for map printing.  This equipment could not be easily or cheaply moved from Virginia to Missiouri.  Much of it was no longer manufactured so it wasn’t like the Engineer School could just go out on the market and buy new equipment so the older stuff could remain in use back at Fort Belvoir.

Fast forward to the 21st Century.  The Army topographers are now called Geospatial Engineers and they long ago abandoned their old traditional map making ways for GIS software, digital data sets and plotters.  All you need to conduct topographic training these days are desktop computers and lots of bandwidth.  Apparently there was no longer any real need for these classes to remain at the NGA College (formerly the Defense Mapping School) at Belvoir.

The last class of Engineer Soldiers and the last class of Army topographers to train at Fort Belvoir have crossed the stage and received their diplomas.  A 97 year old tradition has ended.

Brian

History Revealed! Origins Of The Army Lensatic Compass

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For several years I’ve been trying to piece together the history of the US Army’s lensatic compass.  In an earlier post on this blog we discussed the various types of compasses and a bit of the developmental history that can be inferred by viewing the examples in my collection.  However, there was (and still is) very little solid history on the development of the lensatic compass available on the web.

For an item as ubiquitous as this compass the lack of historical data seems a odd.  The development and usage histories of many other items of WWII-era equipment are well documented.  Take the M1 Garand for example.  Collectors can discuss in detail every single part on that rifle and can accurately date and discern the manufacturer of each part by noting subtle differences in how the piece was machined or finished.  This wealth of knowledge is due to the fact that the development and production records for the Garand were made available decades ago by the US military and the various manufacturers.  Of course collector interest is also a factor.  The Garand is one of the most collected pieces of WWII equipment and when you have thousands of collectors clamoring for detailed information the odds are pretty good someone is going to unearth the data.  Since there can’t be more than a dozen serious collectors of Army lensatic compasses there’s a whole lot less clamoring.

As an item of individual equipment that guided millions of Soldiers across the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific in WWII, and continues in use by our Soldiers today, I’ve always felt the history of the lensatic compass deserved better coverage.

Earlier this week I was on a different quest.  I recently purchased an interesting bit of Army topographic kit, a Vertical Sketchmaster (I’ll do a posting on that later).  Since the device came without paperwork or documentation the first thing I did was hit Google for a quick search.

[A short segue here.  Hey Google, your search results are starting to look like those from the half dozen or so search engines that have all but fallen off the internet.  When I do a search on your site I’m looking for real results, not page after page of ads or eBay listings.  Any more, searching on Google is like searching on – dare I say it – Yahoo!]

Buried about three pages deep in the search results was a reference to a holding in the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) titled “History of [the] U.S. Army Topographic Laboratories (1920 to 1973)”.

The phrase “Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories” got my immediate attention because the document could only be referring to what used to be know as the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Topographic Laboratories, or ETL.  ETL and it’s predecessor organizations within the Corps of Engineers served (and still serve) as the Army’s R&D lab for development of topographic, terrain analysis and geospatial systems, processes and equipment.  Now called the Army Geospatial Center, it was an organization I called on many times during my career for support and advice, and they always came through.

As luck would have it the document is available in digital form through Google.  I immediately downloaded it and started reading.  Published in 1973 as an ETL internal paper by John Pennington, it is a short rundown of the history of the Army’s topographic R&D labs and covers major projects and equipment development between 1920 and 1970.  I don’t want to spend too much time on this document in this post, because I feel it deserves it’s own separate discussion at a later date.  For now I’ll just say it is a treasure trove of historical information.

While reviewing the document for information on the vertical sketchmaster I quickly came across discussion of lensatic compasses.  This was something completely unexpected.  I never considered that the development of the lensatic compass was something an Engineer topographic R&D lab would have been involved with.  After reading the entries it now makes perfect sense – the Engineers had doctrinal responsibility for development of land navigation equipment and were the Army’s subject matter experts on compasses of all types.  While the development of land navigation techniques including the use of map and compass was the responsibility of the Infantry School, development of the compass as an item of equipment was the responsibility of the Engineers.  Of course the two branches worked hand-in-hand on the project, with the Engineers serving as a test and development agency in support of the Infantry School.

The document briefly discusses compass development both prior to and after WWII and adds some fascinating tidbits to the history of the development the lensatic compass:

Since the quality of the scan is pretty poor I’ve reproduced the key parts below:

“(7)  Compasses.  Although the compass is not strictly a surveying instrument, considerable effort was expended by the Mapping Branch of the Engineer Board in the World War II period on the development of small compasses for Infantry and other arms.


The work started in 1938 when the Infantry requested that an inexpensive, commercial-type compass be found to replace the marching compass then issued because the marching compass was too large, elaborate, and costly.  This investigation was assigned to the Engineer Board, and it was soon found that no suitable commercial compass was available.  The W. & L.E. Gurley and the Taylor Instrument Companies, however, were willing to make a suitable compass based on a new design; and each company made six samples in 1939 as ordered from the Engineer Board.


After testing by both the Infantry and Cavalry and some modifications by the manufacturers, in November 1940 the Engineer Board recommended procurement of the cheap lensatic compass from both manufacturers.”


Thus we have the WWII-era M1938 lensatic compass.

M1938 Lensatic Compass
My question now is, was this originally a liquid filled model?  Read below.

One interesting point is that while lensatic compasses made by Gurley are fairly common (they were a major manufacturer of surveying equipment at the time) I have never seen a military lensatic compass made by Taylor Instruments.  However, Taylor Instruments did go on to be a major manufacturer of wrist compasses for the US military in WWII.

But the story is not over.  Even back in 1940 they were struggling with the issue of how to dampen the compass needle or card.

“Since the mechanical dampening arrangements in all compasses available up to that time had not been entirely satisfactory, the Engineer Board started investigations of liquid dampening in December 1941.  Compasses of both the lensatic and the wrist type with liquid dampening were developed, tested, and adopted in the 1941 to 1944 period; and it was thought for a time that the compass problem had been solved.  However, it was discovered that, with temperature changes, an air bubble often developed in the compass capsule which impeded the free movement of the compass needle and affected the accuracy.


In July 1944, the Superior Magneto Corporation, one of the liquid-filled compass suppliers, solved the liquid  dampening problem by applying the induction dampening principle.  The compass body was made of copper which set up an eddy current and magnetic field as the compass needle rotated, thus acting as a drag to dampen the needle oscillation.  Samples were immediately procured and tested.  As a result, the induction dampened wrist compass was standardized in April 1945, and the induction dampened lensatic compass was standardized in May 1945.”


Based on the number of WWII compasses available for sale from auction sites like eBay I think that Superior Magneto was the #1 supplier of lensatic compasses during WWII.  Knowing their core business – the production of magnetos – it makes sense that their engineers would have a clear understanding of the principle of induction and how to apply it to the problem of compass needle dampening.

Today M1938 compasses with induction dampening are easy to identify.  They have a white compass bowl that contains the compass card.  The white bowl is the stamped copper cup that the compass magnet interacts with to slow oscillation.  It is an excellent dampening system and is still used today in US military-issue lensatic compasses.

M1938 Lensatic Compass with induction dampening.
Note the white compass bowl.  This is really a stamped copper cup that interacts
with the north-seeking magnet to reduce oscillation of the compass card.

Let’s skip forward now to the late 1940s, when it was clear that the lensatic compass was in need of an upgrade.

“(3)  Compasses.  The development of compasses, both the wrist and the lensatic types, was reopened in 1947 to provide instruments which would overcome the deficiencies noted in those developed during World War II.  Experimental models of the lensatic compass were produced by Taylor Instrument Company, Rochester, New York (Fig. 84), and the Brunson Instrument Company, Kansas City, Missouri.  Both were found to conform to the military characteristics, but the Brunson model was considered superior.  Experimental models of the wrist compass were produced by the Brunson Instrument Company, Kansas City, Missouri (Fig. 85), and were delivered to ERDL in January 1950.  Cold weather tests of the lensatic compass were conducted at Fort Churchill, Canada, and in January 1951 service test models were procured and shipped to service test agencies.  Here again, as with the compass development during World War II, emergency procurement of large quantities of both compasses were made before all testing and development had been completed.


Development of both compasses was completed in 1952.  The lensatic compass was classified as standard type, and the project was closed in November 1952.”


The result of these tests and type classification are the classic M1950 Lensatic Compass, a design still in use today:

M1950 Lensatic Compass produced in 2010 by Cammenga.
Today Cammenga is the sole contractor producing lensatic compasses
for the US military.

The M1950 is still one of the best compasses ever developed, and I consider it the best military compass ever issued to any military anywhere in the world.

Did Robert E. Lee Spend Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio?

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Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio is like being nowhere at all
All through the day how the hours rush by
You sit in the park and you watch the grass die!
Ah, but after the sunset, the dusk and the twilight
When shadows of night start to fall
They roll back the sidewalk precisely at ten
And people who live there are not seen again!
Just two lonely truckers from Great Falls, Montana
And a salesman from places unknown 
All huddled together in downtown Toledo
To spend their big night all alone!


The song is by Randy Sparks, written after a particularly uninspiring night in Toledo.  John Denver started performing it in the early 1970s and was ‘uninvited’ to do a concert by Toledo Mayor Harry Kessler.  Denver and Toledo eventually kissed and made up, but there’s no denying that Toledo wasn’t, and still isn’t, an entertainment mecca.
_______________________________________________________________________

Everybody’s heard of the great Toledo War, right?

Well, for those of you who haven’t, here’s the synopsis:

In 1835 the State of Ohio and the Territory of Michigan went to war over a six mile strip of land that extended from Toledo west to the Indiana border.  The war arose from a boundary dispute which was triggered by an inaccurate boundary description set out in the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 and an inaccurate description of Ohio’s northern boundary set out in the Enabling Act of 1802 (yet another Congressional screw-up).  Both Ohio and Michigan considered this strip of land, known as the Toledo Strip, to be theirs.  You may well ask (hell, you should ask) why all the interest in Toledo?  Well, in the early 1800s Toledo was poised to become a major shipping center on the Great Lakes.  The Erie Canal had just been opened, triggering a trade and settlement boom in the upper Midwest.  Politicians emboldened by the success of the Erie Canal were talking seriously of financing a canal following the Maumee River from Toledo to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and from there on to the Mississippi River.  If this plan came through then bulk goods could move cheaply by water between New York and the Mississippi.  Toledo would become one of the major trading hubs in North America.  Governors and legislatures drooled over the prospect.  Suddenly Toledo was worth fighting for!

The Toledo War was really nothing more than a bunch of alcohol-fueled hotheads on both sides throwing insults and the occasional lead ball across the border.  Still, the federal government had to do something to settle the dispute.  After long negotiations and intervention by President Andrew Jackson (and a little arm twisting to get Michigan to play along), the border issue was ‘settled’.  All that remained was for a formal boundary survey to be conducted and the results agreed to by both Ohio and Michigan.

Enter Lieutenant Robert E. Lee.  He was appointed to a party of Corps of Engineer officers detailed by the War Department to survey and map the Ohio – Michigan border as described in the agreement:

In 1835 (Washington) Hood was associated with Robert E. Lee in a map-making expedition to settle once and for all the Ohio-Michigan boundary dispute. This involved a strip of land averaging six and one half miles in width and extending along the northern border of Ohio west of Lake Erie. Michigan’s claim was based on the boundary laid down by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). Ohio’s claim was based on the line set forth in its state constitution, which the U.S. Congress had neither confirmed nor rejected when Ohio was admitted to the Union.
To settle this dispute, the government sent Captain Andrew Talcott and Lieutenants Robert E. Lee and Washington Hood to survey and map this area. On the basis of this survey both Michigan and Ohio agreed to compromise and Michigan became a state in 1837. This dispute nearly erupted into a border clash and is often referred to as the “Toledo War.”
– Charles R. Steitz, Jr., “Washington Hood: Five Hundredth Graduate of the United States Military Academy”, Pennsylvania Folklife, 1990, Volume 39, No. 3
Which begs the question, just what do a trio of wild and crazy 19th century West Point grads do for entertainment while in Toledo?  Grab a bite to eat and listen to some jazz music perhaps?
Tony Packo’s.  A Toledo landmark.  The
best damned hot dogs and potato salad in the world
and home of the Cake Walking Jazz Band.

Although Michigan lost this round they were given what is today their Upper Peninsula as compensation.  At the time it seemed like an unfair trade and there was a lot of grousing about it among Michiganders (or Michiganians, or whatever they call themselves).

Today’s Michiganders think it was one heck of a good deal.  All you have to do is drive through downtown Toledo to understand why.

And the Toledo – Mississippi River canal project?  It petered out.  One word.  Railroads.

– Brian

Gas Station Maps

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In olden times, like back in the 1960s, you could pull into any gas station in the US and grab a free road map.  These maps were designed for one purpose – to show the motorist how to get from where he was to where he wanted to be.  The maps were part advertising and part incentive.  The idea was to encourage travel by automobile.  The more you traveled the more gas you burned.

The idea of the free road map was born back in the early 1900s when automobile companies like Ford were involved in a major push to get the state and federal governments to expand and improve roads throughout the country.  Road conditions were simply awful back then and the thought was that better roads would encourage travel and commerce and, of course, spur automobile sales.  This led to the creation of the federal Bureau of Public Roads (later the Federal Highway Administration) and the first allocations of federal money for ongoing road construction and maintenance.

By illustration, one of Harry Truman’s standard campaign platforms when he was serving as a commissioner in Missouri, then Senator and ultimately as President was better roads.  He felt that no farmer in a rural area should have to travel more than two miles to find a paved road to get his crops to market.  The fact that two miles was viewed as a reasonable distance to have to haul products before finding a good road is reflective of the state of road construction in the rural areas of the country right up into the 1950s.

Well, if we’ve got all these good new roads how do we let people know about them?  Why the road map, of course!  Gasoline companies like Texaco, Shell, BP, Mobile, Standard Oil and many others viewed free road maps as part of the cost of doing business.  The gasoline companies didn’t do the map production themselves.  They farmed out the production to one of the few companies that specialized in making road maps.  Rand McNally, Gousha and General Drafting were the major players in this industry and they cranked out millions of maps between 1920 and 1970.

The other great thing about gas station road maps, besides being free, was that they were kept fairly current.  The compilation of these maps was a cooperative effort between the gasoline producers, the mapping companies and local, state and federal road and transportation bureaus.  Maps were updated and re-published as frequently as every year depending on the rate of road construction in a particular state.  Of course each gas company’s map was tailored to show company service stations and to proudly trumpet the superiority of their product over their competitor’s, but the actual map information tended to pretty consistent from company to company.

A side benefit from this program was the standardization of road map symbology.  Map makers realized we needed a common map language to depict things like primary roads, secondary roads, city boundaries, rivers and lakes and route symbols.  In very short order common symbols were standardized and used on all road maps, not just those handed out for free in gas stations.  Map symbols were a unifying language on the highways and byways of mid-20th century America.

In addition, millions of American school kids learned map reading from gas station road maps.   Schools regularly integrated map reading into the curriculum, and the map of choice was the good old gas station road map.  I think the peak of America’s map literacy came in the 1950s, when millions of American kids, eager to tell their parents where to go, took over the job of automobile navigation and honed their skills in route finding and trip planning with good old gas station maps.

In the 1950s we planned our journeys using a paper map and imagination.  Today we fire up the GPS and wait for it to tell us where to go.  I fear we have become map dummies.

Let’s take a trip back in time and see what it was like for a mapping company to keep up with changes to roads and road conditions.  Many would be surprised to learn that the methods used today are pretty much the same as we see in this video.  The equipment has changed – it’s all computerized now – but someone still has to drive the roads and note the changes.

– Brian

From The Deck Of The SS Northing & Easting

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Earlier this morning I let the dogs out to do their business and stepped out onto my deck to have a look around.  Although it was a bit cloudy out I noticed that the Moon was hanging brightly about 8 degrees above my roof line.  Dawn was just starting to break and I figured it would be a good time for this pseudo-mariner to get some practice sights in with the sextant.  The moon is entering its last quarter here in Georgia and there was still enough of the orb available for a good upper or lower limb shot.

I grabbed my old Astra IIIB sextant, screwed on the artificial bubble horizon and spent about 10 minutes practicing ‘pulling down the sight’, focusing more on technique than accuracy.  With a bubble horizon you have a lot of room for error because the horizon indicator (the bubble) is so large when viewed through the sight tube.  Don’t worry – around 0720 EST the Moon was hanging at about 40 degrees 4.8 minutes, right where it should be.  The clockwork heavens are still ticking along just fine.

Astra IIIB Sextant

As I was fiddling with the sextant the winds started pushing the low clouds around and the Moon began darting in and out of view, sometimes partially obscured, sometimes fully obscured.  This made for an interesting practice session as I was forced to time the approach and departure of the heavier cloud patches and practice pulling down the sight quickly before the Moon became too indistinct for a good shot.   This is a common problem in celestial navigation – the navigator is at the mercy of the weather.  That’s why so much emphasis was placed on grabbing a celestial shot whenever the heavens and the weather cooperated.  It is also why so much emphasis was placed on accurate dead reckoning – estimating your current location based on distance and direction traveled from your last known location.  Since you were never sure when you’d be able to get your next celestial fix an accurate running estimate of your position was absolutely crucial.

I was reminded of the particular problem celestial navigation posed for our submarine crews in WWII.  More than any other arm of the Navy, the Submarine Service operated far into enemy waters in search of victims, and they traveled alone.  Accurate navigation was absolutely essential and the navigators assigned to our submarines were some of the best the Navy produced.

WWII submarines were extremely vulnerable when caught in the wrong combination of circumstances.  Our subs like the Gato-class boats were really highly modified surface ships that could spend limited amounts of time under water on battery power.

US Gato-class submarine

The lower spaces of these subs were filled with giant lead acid batteries that allowed the boat to remain submerged for up to 48 hours and maneuver slowly (9 knots).  Eventually, however, the sub had to surface to charge her batteries, refill her air tanks and get a navigational fix.  For a boat operating alone in enemy waters this was a hazardous activity.  A submarine was never more vulnerable than when on the surface with low batteries.  It was common practice for the subs to surface in the dark of night and make a high speed dash to a new hunting area while replenishing her batteries.  The problem is that the middle of the night is generally a lousy time for a celestial fix.  Sure, the skies are filled with stars and planets, but the horizon is difficult to distinguish.  The best time for a fix is at nautical twilight, when the sun is 6 – 12 degrees below the horizon.  At this time the nautical horizon is still distinct and key navigational stars and planets are visible in the darkening sky.  But there’s also enough light left to be spotted by an enemy aircraft or nearby surface ship.

This led to a unique ‘navigator’s dance’ on American submarines.  At twilight the Captain would bring the boat to periscope depth to check for enemy ships and aircraft and to check weather conditions.  If the skies were clear of enemy and clouds he’d give the heads up to the navigator, who was usually the boat’s executive officer.  The navigator would have already checked his navigational tables and picked one or more likely celestial objects to try to use for a fix.  This could be a planet or bright star or, if he was really lucky the Moon was already up and far enough above the horizon to provide a good fix.  The navigator would often wear goggles with red lenses to get his eyes adapted to dark conditions.

The Captain would give the command to surface the boat and once the conning tower was clear of the water the hatch would be opened and the watch personnel would scramble up with binoculars, climb the periscope shears and scan the skies and the horizon for any signs of the enemy.  Once the all-clear was given the navigator would come up with the sextant hanging from his neck by a lanyard.  He would take a series of quick shots on the available celestial bodies and call the sextant readings down to the navigation team in the control room.  The navigation team would note the time of the observations against the boat’s chronometers and begin the process of using the sight readings to establish a line of position.  A quick shot on Polaris gave the navigator an accurate and easily determined latitude, but the shots on the stars and planets to determine longitude took a bit more number crunching.  Things like the height of the navigator above the surface of the water, the time difference from GMT, the uncorrected error built into the sextant and other factors all had to be calculated.  This process was called ‘sight reduction’.  It was (and still is) straight forward but somewhat tedious math.

In the end the navigation team (usually consisting of the executive officer, an enlisted navigator known as a quartermaster and another pair of trained eyes, often those of the Captain) would come up with intersecting lines of position, one for latitude and one for longitude, that provided the boat’s true position at the time the sights were taken.

Here’s an interesting description of the process taken from the book ‘The Underwater War 1939 – 1945‘ by Richard Compton-Hall:

Away from land every opportunity for taking sun, moon, planet and star sights had to be snatched. Sight-taking with a sextant was treated as an evolution; if surfacing primarily for that purpose it was combined when possible with ditching (trash) — which made matters no easier for the navigator competing in the conning tower and on the crowded bridge with a hustling (trash) party, the lookouts and the sea itself. The smallest drop of water on the sextant mirror made sight-taking impossible and the instrument had to be wrapped tenderly in a towel when not actually bringing the observed body down on to the lurching, irregular horizon which, with so low a height-of-eye, made the task doubly difficult. The ‘exec’ was primarily responsible for navigation in American boats (assisted by excellent quartermasters) but German commanders relied upon the equivalent of a specially trained warrant officer to take sights. Most British captains thought sight-taking far too important to entrust to Vasco (the navigator) and did the sextant work themselves; but they were quite happy to delegate the long and boring working-out of the sights when they were taken! It could easily take an hour to plod through the spherical trigonometry (which actually amounted to no more than straight forward arithmetic) before arriving at a solution which almost invariably produced a large cocked hat; this led to thinly veiled hints from Vasco to the effect that the captain was incapable of reading sextant angles, and to more direct accusations from the captain that the navigator was incapable of simple addition and subtraction. Some boats carried rapid reduction tables derived from air navigation manuals which greatly shortened the time required to produce a fix: but the Royal Navy and most other services clung doggedly to Inman’s Nautical Tables with their long columns of five-figure logarithms.

Today we are spoiled.  Want to know where you are on the face of the earth to within a few hundred feet?  Just turn on your smartphone or GPS receiver.  Within seconds you’ll get a position fix that is far more accurate than any experienced navigator could have calculated using celestial navigation.

Yet I believe it is important we continue to practice the old techniques.  First, it is great mental exercise.  To be a good celestial navigator you need to be at least proficient in basic astronomy and mathematics.  You need to know how to evaluate and calculate error.  You need to be a good problem solver.  Celestial navigation is like golf – it takes just a few months to learn but a lifetime to master.  It sure beats playing another round of World of Warcraft.

Next, celestial navigation gives one a greater appreciation for the technology we have available today, and that appreciation and the resulting awareness of the GPS system’s capabilities and limitations will make you a better navigator overall.

And last, the celestial navigation techniques and tools we use today are exactly the same as those used by history’s great explorers and navigators – Capt. James Cook, Lewis and Clark, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, Earnest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Capt. William Bligh (yes that Capt. Bligh) and many others. Anyone interested in the history of exploration can make a direct and relevant connection to their heroes and better appreciate their achievements by dabbling in celestial navigation.

So that’s today’s report from the deck of the SS Northing & Easting.  I’ll keep the spyglass and blunderbuss handy in case the pirates try to board.

Brian

The NGS Does the IAGS

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My blog post last year about the Inter-American Geodetic Survey (IAGS) has has proven to be my most popular post, both in the number of pageviews and the number of comments.  Although I’m not burning up the internet, it is interesting to track where visitor’s interests lie.  Surprisingly, my blog post is also the #2 return on Google searches against the term ‘inter american geodetic survey’ (it seems that the acronym IAGS is in use by several completely unrelated organizations that generate a lot of traffic, so searches against that term won’t put my post anywhere near the top of the list).

I’m both elated and just a bit saddened by this outcome.  Elated that I seem to have hit on poorly covered yet important subject that I can contribute significantly to, yet saddened that the Army Corps of Engineers continues to ignore the very crucial contributions their topographic services and personnel made to the professions of mapping, surveying and geodesy.

When I wrote the blog about the IAGS I noted that there’s very little available information about the organization on the web and I tried to provide links to as much relevant info as I could find.  One of the sources I completely ignored was the excellent article about the IAGS that appeared in the March 1956 edition of the National Geographic Magazine.

March 1956 National Geographic article on the
IAGS.  Click here to read it.

Before the National Geographic gave up serious scholarly writing for feel good stories about baby seals and the therapeutic effects of tree hugging it actually published some darned good stories about geography, exploration, and adventure.  All three of these elements come together in this great story about the IAGS.  It is probably the best, and perhaps the only, popular account of the agency’s activities.  So, follow this link and read about the Men Who Measure the Earth.

Whence The Meridian?

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It seems that most folks’ awareness of history reaches back only 20 or 30 years.  Few today can conceive of a world without laptop computers, cable TV, cell phones and Dancing With The Stars.  Oh how dark and disordered life must have been before the internet!  How did man survive?

Old farts like me realize that history is a cumulative progression of events, and the things we take for granted today had an origin in the murky mists of time long past.

So it is with the concept of longitude and the meridian.  Today we take for granted that the zero line of longitude, the international meridian, runs through Greenwich, England.  It seems just so natural.  Most people today don’t realize that getting the meridian at Greenwich accepted as the world-wide standard was a long, drawn out process that spanned over a hundred years and involved most of the major world powers.  What we take for granted today is actually the result of some pretty intense diplomatic and scientific battles.

Man has realized since the time of the ancient Greeks that the Earth is round(ish) and that one of the best ways to refer to one’s position on this big ball is to use angular measurements – degrees, minutes and seconds.

On land this convention wasn’t really important – the common man was content relating his location as distance and direction traveled from known points.  There was always a track, trail or road that led to where he wanted to go.  The history of the march of civilization is the history of road building.  It’s coded into our DNA.

But as soon as man started sailing out of sight of land things changed.  There are no roads in the middle of the Atlantic.  All sailors had to fall back on was positioning by latitude and longitude.  With the explosion of maritime trade in the 18th and 19th centuries most of the big navigation problems were quickly worked out.  By the late 1700s we had reliable navigation instruments (sextants and chronometers), most of the important places of the world had been charted and sea captains could reliably and safely make their way to the other side of the world and back carrying cargoes that made the ship’s owners immensely wealthy.

But there was one last international navigation issue that was was still hanging out there in the late 1800s that needed to be addressed.  The issue of a common meridian.

Latitude and longitude are calculated from an accepted reference line, or zero line.  For latitude the solution was simple.  The equator is the natural zero line of reference.  When calculating latitude you are measuring your location north or south of the equator – the zero line of latitude.  Simply measure the angular distance from your location to the North Star – Polaris – and you have your latitude in degrees, minutes and seconds.  Mariners around the world have been doing this since before recorded history.  (If you are south of the equator it’s a little trickier since there is no star that hovers directly over the south pole.  However, there are nearby stars such as those that make up the Southern Cross that permit similar measurements.)

Longitude however has always been the problem child of navigation.  Part of the problem is that there is no natural zero line of longitude – the earth does not have a natural vertical equator.  The other problem is that there are no fixed or unmoving celestial bodies – stars or planets – that could offer an easy reference for longitude measurements like Polaris does for latitude measurements.  All the useful celestial bodies are in constant motion overhead.  What was needed was first a fixed reference line – a meridian – and then in reference to that line the minute-by-minute locations of all useful stars and planets as they marched across the sky.  The designation of the meridian also drove the publication of accurate nautical charts for use by merchantmen and navies.  This was a monumental task that only governments could support.

The realization that establishing a meridian and charting the night skies was a national necessity coincided with the scientific revolution of the 1700s.  Nations were willing – even eager – to put their money and their best minds to the task; it became an issue of national pride among the major seafaring nations.  Most also saw it as a national security issue.  These efforts were some of the earliest examples of directed research – scientific investigation not for the sake of enlightenment but to meet a specific economic or military goal.

As a result everybody who fancied themselves a bigshot on the global stage established their own meridian and published navigational charts and celestial almanacs referenced to their meridians.  Most also required their navies and merchant fleets to use their meridian.  Countries such as England (Greenwich), Spain (Madrid), France (Paris), United States (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia), Portugal (Lisbon), Norway (Oslow), Russia (St. Petersburg) and Japan (Kyoto) all developed their own meridians.  Even non-seafaring nations like Switzerland and Romania tried to get in on the act.

By the mid 1800s the worldwide nautical charting community had become a seafaring Tower of Babble; not everybody spoke the same positional language.  At the same time the development of reliable steam power was driving an explosion of commercial shipping activity.  As merchant marine activities became more globalized ship captains, owners and insurance companies began demanding standardized navigational charts and nautical almanacs.  A ship captain sailing from Boston needed to know that when he got to Lisbon and needed a new chart he could walk into a chandler and purchase a chart that uses to the same meridian he was trained to use and was comfortable with.  Seafaring nations realized that a single universally recognized meridian was a good thing.  But whose meridian would be the winner?

In 1884 the President of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, got representatives from all the key nations together in a big room at the State Department in Washington D.C. and told them to figure it out.  By this time the US really didn’t have a dog in the fight; although we were willing to accept Greenwich, England as our standard Prime Meridian we were open to switching and were not going to push a US-based solution.  My guess is that most of the attendees saw the US as something of a neutral party in this argument, which is why they agreed to show up and work things out.

The ‘International Conference For the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day’ was convened on October 1st 1884 and ran for the full month.  The proceedings can be found on the Project Gutenberg website.  The proceedings are an interesting read from a historical, scientific and political perspective.  The delegates from France did a lot of talking, extolling the glories of the Empire and the primacy of the observatory in Paris.  In the end however Greenwich in England won out, in large part, I suspect, because at the time over 72% of the world’s shipping used nautical charts based on the Greenwich meridian.  The Greenwich solution had the weight of numbers behind it and came without a lot of Gallic preening and posturing.

And so we have the Final Act:

Note who decided to take a pass on the final vote.  Sore losers I guess.

The conference addressed and adopted a number of other issues including the designation of a ‘universal day’.  This is why we have Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT (also referred to as UTC) and the standard solar day starts, and ends, at Greenwich.

After the conference the US Congress moved quickly to adopt Greenwich as the standard prime meridian for all US-based mapping and charting.  The US Navy and the Royal Navy began working jointly on the development and maintenance of nautical almanacs for celestial navigation and the sharing of nautical charts.  This is a collaboration that continues to today.

So there you have it.  Something a seemingly mundane as the starting point for all longitudinal measurements around the world actually has a history that impacts us today.

Brian

Spy Satellites Declassified

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A KH-9 Hexagon Imagery Satellite.  The thing’s as big
as a Greyhound bus!

On 17 September 2011 the US declassified the KH series of satellites and their mission information.

Guess now I can tell my wife what I was doing for most of those 23 years I was in the Army.

What’s not discussed in the story, and I won’t go into too much detail until I know for sure it’s OK to discuss it in full, is the contribution these satellites made to the DoD’s world-wide mapping program.  Suffice to say, without these birds we would not have been able to accurately map the vast territories of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and all the other hostile places we thought we might have to go fight in.

More to follow…  Maybe.

Brian

Ohio Is Such a Mess

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“On the road above the Bell Company’s dock, Pennsylvania Route 68 invisibly changes to Ohio Route 38, and trees half hide some signs by the roadside.  The place could hardly be more anonymous.  Even someone familiar with the historical significance of this particular spot, who has traveled several thousand miles to find it, and whose eyes are flickering wildly from the narrow blacktop to the grassy verge between the road and river, can drive a couple of hundred yards past it before hitting the brakes.

The language of the signs is equally undemonstrative.  A stone marker carries a plaque headed “The Point of Beginning” that reads “1112 feet south of this spot was the point of beginning for surveying the public lands of the United States.  There on September 30th, 1785, Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, began the Geographer’s Line of the Seven Ranges.”

There is nothing to suggest that it was here that the United States began to take physical shape, nothing to indicate that from here a grid was laid out across the land that would stretch west to the Pacific Ocean, and north to Canada, and south to the Mexican border, and would cover more than three million square miles, and would create a structure of land ownership unique in history…”

 – Andro Linklater, “Measuring America” 


In his wonderful book Measuring America, author Andro Linklater explains in detail just how it is that the concept of property ownership, and in particular the ownership of land, is the cornerstone of the American republic.  America was founded on the concept of property rights, and there is no greater realization of that concept than the idea that the common man can buy, hold and own land and that he, his family and his descendants will prosper and profit from the ownership and improvement of land.  The land does not belong to a government or a sovereign, but to the people.  It was a radical concept in 1776 and it is still very much a unique concept in the world today.

At the end of the Revolutionary War the weak federal government was cash poor but increasingly land rich.  Under the Articles of Confederation the federal government had no authority to raise revenue through taxation – that power was still retained by the individual states.  But the states were defaulting on their obligations to provide funding for the federal government.  The federal Army had not been paid for months and was on the brink of mutiny.  We had no navy to speak of.  Revolutionary War veterans were holding IOUs from the Continental Congress that were about to come due and our overseas creditors were demanding payment.  In desperation the federal government turned to the only asset it had available – land.

The Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War gave the new American nation control of a large tract of land west of the Ohio River in what is today southeastern Ohio.  This was really the only tangible asset the federal government owned that was not already claimed by one of the 13 states.  Almost in desperation, the Congress of the Confederation  hit on the idea of land sales as a way to support the struggling federal government.  The idea was simple – divide up the land and sell it for a dollar an acre. Cash only, no credit!

But how to divide it?  This new nation needed a land measurement and inventory system that was logical, easy to implement and resulted in land parcels that could be easily and quickly sold.  The resulting system, codified in the Land Ordinance of 1785, gave us what we know today as the township and range land survey system.  Conceptually is was simple – divide the land into six miles square sections (townships), then subdivide each township into one mile square sections, then further into quarter sections.  The initial unit of sale was a quarter section of 640 acres.

But where to start?  The Congress of the Confederation set up a committee to study the issue and appointed Thomas Hutchins, a noted military engineer and surveyor, as Geographer of the United States.  It was decided to start the land survey at the point where Pennsylvania’s northwestern boundary intersects the Ohio River.  This point became the Point of Beginning for all public land surveys in the United States.

So, on a blustery day in late September, 1785, Thomas Hutchins and his survey party walked down to the banks of the Ohio River, drove a stake in the ground, set their survey instruments up and began to lay out what became known as the Seven Ranges region of Ohio.

From this Point of Beginning Thomas Hutchins set in place the land survey system that would ultimately encompass 75% of the land mass of the United States, clearly establish and define private land ownership and set the stage for the explosive westward expansion of the US in the 19th century.  On September 30th, 1785 Thomas Hutchins literally drove the stake that established the geographic fabric upon which the United States was built.

Ohio was to be the proving grounds for the township and range survey system.  Like a lot of first tries at anything problems cropped up, adjustments were made and shortcuts were taken.  Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that much of the land in what we today call Ohio was subject to prior claim.  Large areas of  northern Ohio were ceded to Native Americans under various treaties.  Connecticut claimed a large region stretching from present day Sandusky, Ohio east to the Pennsylvania border.  Virginia claimed a large tract in the south to use to compensate her veterans.  Other bits and pieces here and there were set aside.  Ohio was a patchwork quilt of land claims, set-asides, treaty lands and private holdings.
Ohio Land Claims – 1800’s

But very quickly another series of problems popped up.  Congress was pressured by speculators to sell large chunks of land.  Congress saw this as a way to generate quick cash – sell land at a slight discount for immediate payment and let the speculators carry the cost of the land surveys.  The land speculators saw it as a road to riches – if they could sell fast.  But before any land could be sold it had to be surveyed and the surveys registered.  That meant the surveys needed to be done fast.  Accuracy be damned!

In the 18th century anyone with rudimentary math skills and who could afford a surveyor’s compass and chain could call themselves a surveyor, and many did.  Since surveyors at the time were paid by the mile the faster they worked the more they got paid.  This meant the surveys were sloppy and niceties like calculating the local differences between true north and magnetic north were either not done as often as required or simply not done at all.

As a result, a lot of Ohio’s township and range section lines take off at odd angles and don’t quite form square parcels.  Eventually the errors accumulated and corrections had to be made.  Often it was the simple expedient of offsetting a north-south range line at the start of the next township line.  Since roads in Ohio tended to follow the township and range section boundaries this led to the quirky (and often dangerous) tendency of country roads ending at a T-intersections for no apparent reason, then picking up again about 100 feet east or west of the end point.  These little jogs are a modern reflection of the corrections the surveyors were forced to build into their work over 200 years ago.

Other times the errors were so extreme that there was really no way to correct them and the government was just forced to incorporate the errors into the public record as-is:

The intersection of surveys for the Symmes Purchase, Virginia Military Reserve
and standard Public Land Survey areas.  There are about three different
interpretations of true north indicated by these township and range layouts!

So there you have it.  Ohio is a darned mess.  But a fascinating mess that leaves us the physical traces of the birth of the survey system that made westward expansion possible.

– Brian

Measuring Things

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US Coast & Geodetic Survey leveling party working in Atlanta, 1927

In the olden days, like before GPS, before you could make an accurate map real men had to go out and measure things.  This ‘measuring’ was called surveying, and it involved the extremely precise and accurate determination of the horizontal and/or vertical location of points on the ground known as survey control.  This survey control establishes the accurate framework upon which a map is built.  Horizontal measuring was called triangulation. Vertical measuring was called leveling.

 
The picture above comes from the US Coast & Geodetic Survey 1927 Seasons Report prepared by Captain E. O. Heaton (USC&GS).  It shows a topographic leveling party at work in Atlanta.  If anyone can figure out where in Atlanta these guys are working I’d love to know!
A few things to note.  The fellow holding the umbrella is most likely a black local laborer hired to help the party haul equipment and provide general assistance.  The umbrella he’s holding isn’t to keep the surveyor from getting sunburned – it is to protect the instrument from direct sun and prevent glare when sighting through it.  To ensure accuracy survey parties often used umbrellas to shade their instruments and stabilize temperatures.
The fellow squatting is a surveyor who is acting as the recorder.  He is writing down the readings being called out by the surveyor looking through the instrument.  The recorder’s job was extremely important because he didn’t just write down what the surveyor called out, he would do on-the-fly quality control checks on the values the surveyor gave him to ensure they were staying within the accuracy standards established for that particular survey.  If the recorder makes a single mistake, such as not catching an error in the surveyor’s observations or by writing something down wrong (like inadvertently transposing a number or putting a decimal point in the wrong place) he could lose an entire day’s work.  In my experience you wanted your  most meticulous guy and your best mathematician doing this job – perfectionists made good recorders.  The recorder is writing his notes down in a bound hardback book known as a survey field notebook.  That notebook would be turned in to the USC&GS at the end of the project and go on to become a part of the legal record of the survey.  I have no doubt that very notebook still exists in the archives of the USC&GS now held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  I’d love to take a peek at it!

(The job of recorder is one of those skills that has been replaced by computers.  Today’s surveying instruments now automatically store the readings and calculate values internally.  The computer integrated into the survey level lets the surveyor know via a digital display if the readings are within the specifications set for the job.  It’s called digital leveling.)

But what is the surveyor looking at?  Well, there are two people missing from this photo that make up the leveling party.  The surveyor is looking through the survey level at a stadia rod being held by another party member known as a rod man.  A stadia rod is a long pole marked off in feet and inches.  Behind the surveyor is another rod man with another stadia pole (the location of the stadia poles is determined by the survey party chief and is based mainly on topography and the ability to see both poles from where the survey level is set up).  The surveyor looks though the level and calls out the elevation mark he sees on the first stadia rod.  He then reverses direction and calls out the elevation he views on the second stadia rod.  The difference in numeric values he views on the two stadia poles is the difference in elevation between them:
Click on the image to open full size
Additionally, if this is a simple differential leveling job (and I think it is based on the type of level being used), there is another crew of chain men measuring the distance between the two stadia rods.  In 1927 this would have been done using steel survey tapes or chains.
Leveling is slow, tedious and physically demanding work.  There were no old farts out working on leveling parties except perhaps as party chiefs.  The rod men and the chain men were constantly moving, carrying the survey forward.  The instrument man and the recorder were responsible for moving and setting up the level in a new location, and the party chief was moving between all members of the survey party and scouting ahead for new setup locations.
Their work was absolutely critical, though.  The meticulous work of the surveyors of the US Coast & Geodetic Survey and the US Geological Survey created the accurate spatial framework that this countries maps and charts continue to be built upon.
But that’s not the end of this story!  I got interested in this picture for a particular reason.  The vertical survey control for the airport I work at was established by this particular USC&GS survey project.  I would like to think that it was these three unnamed gentlemen who, sometime in 1927 or 28, ran their traverse down into College Park, GA and set the single elevation benchmark that became the origin point for all vertical survey work done at the airport until the advent of GPS-based survey in the late 1990s.
Brian