Abstract
THE progress of invention has placed in the hands of surveyors a number of beautiful new methods, and some we have not yet scientifically explored. Would you measure a base? So far from painfully seeking a dead-level plain and clearing it of every petty obstruction, you will gaily take the suspended invar tapes across country, and by preference run them up a hill at each end to get a better view for the base extension. Would you equip a party for primary tri-angulation? Look thankfully at Ramsden's 36-inch theodolite reposing in the museum of the Ordnance Survey; look doubtfully at the fashionable ic-inch; and before you take it any more into the field, examine whether the instrument of the future is not a 5-inch constructed on the new principles of Mr. Henry Wild, with circles etched on glass, and parallel plate micrometer that reads opposite points of the circle from the eye-end and takes the mean for you. When you lay out the triangulation, consider well the recent opinion of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, that it is better to be content with small triangles easily accessible, with automatic electric beacons tended by a partyin a car, than to make enormous efforts at rays longer than Nature easily allows. Bear in mind also a remark which our lamented friend Col. Edmund Grove-Hills made to me not long before his death. I was saying how necessary it was to complete as soon as possible the late Sir David Gill's great arc of meridian in Africa; and to my horror Hills referred contemptuously to the meridian arc as an “obsolete method.” He did not pursue the idea; but I think we can see what was in his mind, and that he was right. The old-fashioned arc stuck to the meridian or the parallel with a sublime disregard of the topographer's convenience. It had infrequent bases measured with pomp and ceremony. It had occasional astronomical latitudes and azimuths observed with an almost painful degree of internal precision by heavy instruments and prolonged sojourn on uncomfortable heights.
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HINKS, A. The Science and Art of Map-Making1. Nature 116, 715–719 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116715a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116715a0