Modern Histories of Geodesy and Surveying

An overview

The internal history of surveying—the history of surveying written by practicing and academic surveyors—is an important part of map history generally, but it is only in part relevant to the ways in which “the map” has been conceptualized in theory and practice within map studies, so I have finally decided to present this material in the blog. I previously wrote on the early history of geodetic surveying.

update 5 July 2021: I added a few further bits that proved to be extraneous as I reconfigured the chapter.

The professions and academic disciplines concerned with the observation and measurement of the earth’s surface—in short, the amalgam of practices that have often been grouped together as “land surveying”—have promoted extensive studies of mapping practices and institutions. The “higher order” surveys undertaken for geodesy and for systematic state mapping have long been the traditional focus. The history of geodetic surveys has been undertaken by scientists who have written their disciplinary histories from an internal perspective; the histories of high order surveying have tended to blur into the treatment of surveying generally by historians of science as they achieved disciplinary autonomy in the twentieth century. Other, basic kinds of surveying have had a more varied historiographical occurrence.

The modern stereotype of the internal map historian is the older practitioner or scholar who has become an administrator of others, who perhaps witnesses the loss of institutional memory as colleagues retire or die, or who seeks to explain something about the past of a particular institution, or perhaps of an entire field, to younger colleagues. Much of this work, especially when undertaken through the medium of the after-dinner speech (Oliver 2007), has comprised nostalgic reminiscence and is marked by a pronounced romanticism if not outright hagiography. A former director of the Ordnance Survey justified this approach because it adds “enchantment to the memories” and because “some, at least” of the former map makers who were lauded had indeed been “great men” (Wintherbotham 1944, 186). The stereotype, however, obscures several other reasons why practitioners have sought to address the history of their craft: to position themselves at the forefront of their community and enhance their professional self-esteem; to demonstrate their quality and worth to paymasters, whether patrons, clients, bureaucrats, or a more nebulous public; to fulfill an intellectual curiosity about the origins of particular mapping techniques; and to define and delimit the scope of professional practice or academic study vis-à-vis other professions or disciplines.

Geodesy within Histories of Mathematics and Astronomy

In 1720, Jacques Cassini (II, 1677–1756) announced that the completed measurement of the arc of the meridian through Paris, from Perpignan in the south to Amiens in the north, provided empirical proof that the earth is elongated, or squeezed at the equator, rather than being flattened at the poles, as Isaac Newton and others had theorized (Cassini 1720). The announcement had profound implications for the field of geodesy. Further investigation of the precise shape of the earth split into two distinct components. Mathematical or geometrical geodesy has entailed the measurement of the earth’s dimensions and figure; this is the arena of geodetic surveys and it is closely aligned with both astronomy and official territorial mapping projects. Dynamic or physical geodesy is the study of the earth’s constitution and gravitational field, which is closely aligned with the fields that would coalesce as geophysics in the nineteenth century (Perrier 1939, 3). Geodetic surveyors henceforth abandoned the limited historical reflections by which their predecessors had firmly situated their measurements of the earth’s size within a scientific tradition originating in ancient Greece and instead turned to new proofs of authority, specifically the great quality of their increasingly precise instruments and the supreme subtlety of the techniques they painstakingly followed. To this end, geodetic surveyors provided accounts of how each survey had proceeded, the conditions they faced, and the problems they had overcome (Delambre 1798, vi) without reference to previous geodetic surveys (see my early history of geodetic surveying).

Yet even as eighteenth-century geodetic surveyors ceased their historical reflections, newly professionalizing mathematicians and astronomers created a new discursive thread in which they used historical accounts of geodesy to sustain the innately progressive character of their sciences. Astronomers had of course been interested in the earth’s size since Antiquity, because it provides the basic yardstick for determining distances from the earth to the moon, sun, the planets, and the fixed stars. The wide variation in the earth’s size postulated by ancient scholars was nonetheless of little significance because they employed geometrical methods to determine the shapes and dimensions of the orbits of the planets and of comets relative to each other; they did not require the earth’s size to be known in absolute terms (Delambre 1814, 3:512). Early cosmographers made their calculations with whichever size they deemed most appropriate (Van Helden 1985, 4–8, 24, 30–31, 34).

This situation changed dramatically when Newton published the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction in his Principia (Newton 1999 [1689]). Newton could not have formulated nor have applied this law without the determination of precise, absolute magnitudes for the distances between objects in the solar system, distances based in turn on a precise, absolute size of the earth. Geodesy rapidly became a central activity for astronomers because it was an essential contribution to the refinement of the theory of gravitational attraction and of the theory’s implications for tracing and determining the motions of the planets. Moreover, Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction established a causal link between the earth’s material constitution and its shape, such that the determination of the earth’s shape served to prove Newton’s theories. As a leading British astronomer would later summarize the situation:

But by the discoveries of Newton the Figure of the Earth was shown to depend on the same theory which explains with such wonderful accuracy the motions of the Planets and their satellites. The investigations of the most profound Mathematicians have since been directed to its [the earth figure’s] determination, from the Principles of Gravitation [i.e., theoretical studies of fluid dynamics]; and the labours of the most able experimenters have been employed in ascertaining it from actual observation [i.e., geodetic surveys and pendulum observations]; and the comparison of the results of theory and of observation shows that their agreement, though not perfectly exact, is sufficiently so to enable us to assert with confidence, that the Principle of Gravitation is well founded. Indeed, for one part of that Principle, (viz. that the attraction of a Planet is not a force directed to its centre, but is the resultant of all the forces directed to every one of its particles,) it may be considered as affording the most satisfactory proof that we can expect ever to have. (Airy 1845, 165)

The history of geodesy thus became a major part of pioneering histories of astronomy prepared in large part to justify and to delimit the subject as a specific and innately progressive discipline (Kragh 1987, 7–8; Laudan 1993, 7–9). The proto-disciplinary histories set out to define “what we have done and what we can do” (Bailly 1779, 3:315; quoted by Kragh 1987, 3).

The past was to be known for how science had developed into the contemporary era, but only those details that were immediately relevant to present-day practices were important. In this respect, mathematicians and astronomers drew a sharp divide between geodetic works undertaken since Jean Picard’s initial survey of part of the Paris meridian in 1668–70—i.e., surveys that possessed a degree of precision sufficient to fuel inquiries into the fundamental question of gravitational attraction—and all earlier works that were simply too imprecise and inaccurate. The results of the surveys before Picard’s were indeterminate because the units of measurement remained undefined and obscure, and they could be readily dismissed as having been made only to satisfy innate curiosity and to fulfil the merely pragmatic need to make better land maps and sea charts (e.g., Montucla 1758, 2:230–31, 506–7).

The presentism and progressivism of the histories of mathematics and astronomy were on full display in both Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s long essay on the figure of the earth in the Encyclopédie and Jean Étienne Montucla’s wide-ranging history of mathematics to 1700 (Laudan 1993, 5–7). D’Alembert (1717–83) declined to discuss geodetic surveys before Picard, because the “imperfection of [their] methods and instruments” made their results of no significance to contemporary natural philosophy. Should any reader still be interested in the early measurements, d’Alembert referred them to earlier works for details (Alembert 1756, 749–52, esp. 752; citing Riccioli 1672; Cassini 1720). [n1] Instead of an historical essay, d’Alembert devoted his essay to calculating the earth’s precise figure from the more recent measurements (Passeron 1996).

Montucla (1725–99) did discuss each of the pre-triangulation measurements of the earth’s size, extolling their originality and the audacious efforts of their undertakers, but he found severe problems with each—in their instrumentation, project design, and execution—such that none could compare favorably with contemporary measurements. The early surveys thus served to mark the primitive and unsophisticated beginnings of the mathematical sciences. Montucla did give close attention to Willibrord Snellius’s early seventeenth-century survey: first, the survey provided an excuse to explain the process of triangulation, which Snellius had deployed for the first time in a geodetic survey; second, Snellius’s shortcomings as a calculator had been overcome by the recalculation of his work by his countryman, Petrus van Musschenbroek (1729, 398–420; see Haasbroek 1968, 68–85). [n2] Finally, Montucla hailed the triangulation of the Paris meridian, starting with Picard’s initial survey, as indicating the contemporary progress in mathematics that had been achieved through the application of reason (Montucla 1758, 1:253–54, 1:343–44, 2:230–35, 2:507–10).

Dedicated histories of astronomy had the room to consider geodetic surveys in more detail and so were able to assess their quality. This in turn required determining the modern equivalents of the units of measure deployed, so that the early results could be meaningfully compared against modern values for the earth’s dimensions. The analyses by Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736–93)—who would become first mayor of Paris, during the Revolution, before his execution in 1793—were complicated by his conviction that ancient units of measure all stemmed from a supposed ur-measure based on the size of the earth. Modern geodesy was for Bailly bound up with Tycho Brahe’s and Johannes Kepler’s refinements of Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmology, with the perfection of pendulum clocks, with debates over recreating (in his view) a universal measure, and the new geodetic surveys, all explicated in far more detail than any previous scholar had done. However, by ending his history in 1720, Bailly avoided having to retell the dispute over the shape of the earth and the complicated ways in which the earth had been modeled as a rotating fluid (Bailly 1779, 1:143–68, 2:337–76).

The prominent geodesist and astronomer Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre (1749–1822) continued Bailly’s historical work, although not his view of the ancient origins of astronomy (Laudan 1993, 11; Raina 2003). An introduction composed of “purely historical details” was integral to defining geodesy’s innately progressivist character in the chapter on the subject in his textbook on contemporary astronomical methods (Delambre 1814, 3:512–25, esp. 525). He expanded this argument in several parts of his exhaustive volumes on the history of astronomy (Delambre 1817, esp. 1:90–91 re Eratosthenes; Delambre 1819, 2 and 66 re the measurement ordered by the caliph al-Mamûn ca. 830, 382–83 re Jean Fernel; Delambre 1821, 2:92–110 and figs. 22 and 26 re Snellius and van Musschenbroek, 598–613 and fig. 63 re Picard). These volumes were so very large because Delambre gave very full abstracts of his predecessors’ publications—explaining, in particular, how both Snellius and Picard had themselves written about early geodetic measurements (Delambre 1821, 2:92–96, 599)—but he did also make has own assessments of previous measurements, in which he addressed questions of metrology and the quality of each survey by comparison to modern techniques and reinvestigations. Delambre was especially interested in Picard’s geodetic survey, which he had revisited during his own 1792–98 resurvey of the Paris meridian to define the length of the meter. Delambre intended to treat the complex debates and surveys prompted by Newton’s Principia in two further volumes, one covering the Newtonian revolution in astronomy, the other post-Newtonian geodesy (Delambre 1821, 1:li). However, both volumes remained incomplete at his death in 1822. When finally edited and published almost a century later, the volume on geodesy consisted entirely of detailed abstracts of the accounts of each geodetic survey, with little consideration of the mathematical modeling of the earth’s gravitational attraction and its figure (Delambre 1912). Those theoretical concerns were also understandably absent from the posthumous volume dedicated to eighteenth-century astronomy (Delambre 1827).

Issues of gravitation, the earth’s figure, pendulum experiments, and geodetic surveys remained of concern to what became known in the early nineteenth century as physical astronomy. In the United Kingdom, the future astronomer royal, George Biddell Airy (1801–92), regarded geodesy as integral to the kind of mathematical study of physical phenomena that needed to be pursued in Britain (Airy 1826, 61–116). In 1830 he prepared an exhaustive account of geodetic work in which he calculated a new set of parameters for the earth’s figure, but only after a detailed summary of previous works both to measure and to mathematically model the earth (published as Airy 1845, esp. 165–74). Airy’s account is memorable as the first to actually consider the history of dynamic geodesy and the mathematical modelling of the earth’s form as a rotating fluid. His concerns were at once progressivist and nationalistic, as he saw the history of geodesy as proving the validity of Newton’s celestial mechanics. Robert Grant (1814–92), in his history of physical astronomy, simply ignored geodetic undertakings before Picard and similarly focused on the application of geodetic results to Newtonian theories (Grant 1852, esp. 66–76). The Ordnance Survey’s Alexander Ross Clarke (1828–1914) followed suit in his textbook on geodesy in which an evaluation of geodetic measurements since Picard prefaced the use of their results in calculating the earth’s figure anew (Clarke 1880, 1–36). As the Newtonian theory of gravitational attraction became incontrovertible, physical astronomy increasingly looked solely to the phenomena found in the night skies (Smith 2003) and left the geodetic study of the earth’s gravitational field to an emergent geophysics (Oreskes and Doel 2003, 538).

Practicing geodesists, like their eighteenth-century forebears, addressed the progressive qualities of their own surveys—in their instrumentation, survey design, and results—rather than the history of their field. General histories of geodesy fell within the purview of the history of mathematics, for which they demonstrated the development of the modern science and its techniques. The prominent British mathematician Isaac Todhunter (1820–84) produced several histories of elements of mathematics: the theory of probability, the calculus of variations, elasticity, and more particularly of the theory of gravitational attraction and the figure of the earth (Todhunter 1873). For Helge Kragh (1987, 8–9), Todhunter exemplified a new kind of specialist historian of science: the “professional scientist” who writes for the benefit of the present-day student by producing “accurate specialist account[s]” that are “impressive” and “still profitably consulted” but whose “technical level renders them unreadable for the non-mathematicians.” Even though he focused solely on geophysical models and gave very little attention to the geodesy’s geometrical components, Todhunter’s work was very much in the same vein as previous histories, comprising as it did more “a chronicle with textual glosses, not a history,” and his presentism misconstrued key works in the debate (Greenberg 1995, 402). A further, more straightforward history of geodetic arc measurements by a much lesser mathematician plainly announced its presentist and progressivist agenda:

The results here gathered are intended to show the progress and development of the work, thus enabling one to obtain a comprehensive idea of what has been accomplished in the subject, and to note the progress in methods and the precision attained. (Butterfield 1906, unpaginated preface)

Twentieth-century historians of mathematics continued their internalist interest in specific elements of the mathematics of geodesy, especially in the particular context of the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss (Müller 1918; Galle 1924; Miller 1972; Goe et al. 1974; Breitenberger 1984).

Geodesy and Official Surveys

The initial organization of mathematics and astronomy as disciplines and the new histories of their past progress by Jean Étienne Montucla (1758) and Jean Sylvain Bailly (1779) mark the onset of the “second scientific revolution” and its profound intellectual and institutional changes (which I summarize from a mapping perspective in Edney 2020). Indeed, Bailly (1779, 1:144) prefigured the later formation of the ideal of cartography when he stated, in reference to the contemporary project to map the territory of France, led by César François Cassini (III) de Thury, that early geodetic measurements had integrated astronomical phenomena with geographical knowledge of the earth as a whole, and more particularly of his own country. “Man has found in astronomy,” he wrote, “in the correspondence of heaven and earth, the method of measuring the world, without abandoning one’s country, and almost without leaving home.” [n3] Bailly recognized how geodetic surveys apparently unified geography and topography in a single, systematic mapping practice (Edney 2019, 106–11, 199–205). As Western governments increasingly pursued systematic surveys of their territories and inshore waters, they integrated specifically geodetic work within larger systems of surveying intended to map landscapes, cadasters, and hydrography (Edney 2017, 164–70). As the idealization of the unity of cartography took hold, a new kind of official history of governmental surveying institutions blurred with both the history of geodetic surveys and with accounts of the history of land surveying generally.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, as official surveys transitioned from specially funded, ad hoc projects into formal government agencies with permanent budgets, leading scientist-surveyor-bureaucrats increasingly engaged in institutional histories of their geodetic surveys and of the more detailed territorial surveys that depended on them (Edney 2012, 295–96). Many such institutional histories have been written, and continue to be written, for example of surveys in India (Markham 1878; Phillimore 1945; Chadha 1990), Great Britain (White 1886; Close 1926; Seymour 1980), France (Berthaut 1898–99; Huguenin 1948), Italy (Mori 1903; Mori 1922), Belgium (Hennequin 1891), Netherlands (Linden 1981), Norway (Harsson and Aanrud 2016), Canada (Thomson 1966), and the United States (Evans and Frye 2009 [1955]; Rabbitt 1979; Woodford 1991).

Such institutional histories have pursued several different lines of argument, depending on their perspective, but all sought to put the surveyors and their institutions in the best light possible. Most were not limited to bureaucratic history, but provided detailed accounts of how each particular survey had been undertaken, and as such blur into historical accounts of individual surveys. In an opinion piece written for his fellow surveyors, H. S. L. Winterbotham (1878–1946), formerly director general of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, explained the benefits of such historical work:

Survey history gives a yard-stick by which to assess the value, the authenticity and the precision of such measurement or topography as still underlies our work. It encourages us by showing what obstacles can be overcome, and it also teaches us to avoid the dangers, delays or mistakes we may, all unwittingly, repeat. The last are many indeed.…

Naturally every important original trigonometrical survey is described. How else could posterity add to it, adjust it to fit new conditions, or judge when its useful days are numbered? In every survey, however, there are many matters concerning methods arid processes which are rarely described, and which yet reflect a lot of patient trial and error. The reasons for their adoption are apt to get lost, and the same trial and error may be repeated.…Then, again, who ever heard of a Survey Department so liberally financed that it could put the proper amount of work into each field survey?…That means that the town plan of X, or the topographical map of Y, had to be finished off without proper revision or an adequate framework. It is essential that these makeshifts should be recorded, or the whole may be rejected because a part is faulty. (Winterbotham 1944, 186)

Some institutional histories were written by retired, senior officers with professional development in mind. For example, Reginald Phillimore (1879–1964) “intended” his monumental Historical Records of the Survey of India “first for professional surveyors now working in India, and their successors, that they may know…how the modern system came to be built up. They will want to know all the work-a-day details, and many will be interested in the human lives of their predecessors” (Phillimore 1945, 1:x). Such works present a forbidding array of facts organized around three primary themes: who surveyed which areas when; with what instruments and techniques; and how well they did so. A persistent topic of discussion is the vicissitudes that surveyors had to overcome, especially those imposed by constantly shifting government policies and cheese-paring accountants. After reading the modern official history of the U.K.’s Ordnance Survey, one reviewer summarized this consistent theme:

The Survey was fortunate in having Directors General who played significant roles in [its] history.…If it were not for their skillful defence of the spending of [their] funds, and their lobbying for additional funds, the survey would not have carried forth its impressive mapping programmes. (Dubreuil 1987, 30; re Seymour 1980)

Institutional histories have frequently verged on the hagiographic, as surveyor after surveyor is lauded for their triumphs.

Other institutional histories were written by active officers with a keen sense of having to keep the purse strings open and the funding flowing. Winterbotham (1944, 187) explicated the situation: “properly kept histories are of the utmost help in discussing survey programmes with the financial authorities.…[T]o show how ultimate economy is to be found thereby is inevitably a matter of history.” A good early example is a report prepared in 1851 by the surveyor general of India as part of a successful defense against the existential threat to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India posed by a member of parliament who sought to slash or eliminate its budget (Waugh 1851; see Edney 1997, 23). Such official accounts were careful not to imply that political and bureaucratic overseers were ever inconstant or contrary. Rather, as Jos Gabriels (2019, 259) observed with respect to Henri Berthaut (1848–1937) and his history of French military engineers (Berthaut 1898–1902), the accounts always emphasized the contributions of the surveys to the state and to science. Thus, Berthaud “offers an extremely detailed inventory of the epic accomplishments of these employees, who—while overcoming numerous problems of various natures in the field—served geographic science in general and French Army command in particular.”

In a few instances, surveyor-bureaucrats took on a comparative analysis and evaluation of the many geodetic and territorial surveys undertaken in Europe, North America, and their colonies, each time for a specific purpose. Cyrus B. Comstock (1831–1910) of the US Corps of Engineers undertook such an historical review of the various European surveys then under way to demonstrate that the corps’ hydrographic survey of the Great Lakes—the US Lake Survey (1841–1882)—had indeed been adhering to established best practices (Comstock 1876). A decade later, another US military engineer, Major George M. Wheeler (1842–1905), engaged in an extensive review of official European and colonial surveys. Wheeler had been in charge of one of the four “great surveys” of the West during the 1870s, whose duplication had prompted the eventual formation of the US Geological Survey in 1879. The USGS’s first superintendent was little interested in territorial mapping and, even as the second superintendent was beginning a mapping program, starting in 1884, Wheeler sought to step into the breach and argue that a systematic survey of the entire United States should be done, just as such surveys were done in Europe and their colonies, by military engineers and not by civilian scientists (Wheeler 1885). By the end of the nineteenth century, European geodesists and government mapping agencies were collaborating in two main areas: in pan-European geodetic measurements and in the International Map of the World at one to one million (1/M). A retired Prussian engineer and surveyor, Captain Willibald Stavenhagen (1859–1922), argued that there remained a need for still greater international collaboration, in the production of more detailed territorial surveys. To do so, he undertook a comparative review of topographical surveys outside of Germany, outlining the similarities and differences in practice (Stavenhagen 1904).

A specific arena of surveying that has been subject to internal institutional histories has been the history of marine charting and of hydrography in the modern era, once Western governments engaged in their systematic prosecution. Just within the British tradition, for example, we find (auto)biographical memoirs (Ritchie 1992) and accounts of particular voyages and expeditions (Somerville 1928; Ritchie 1958), heavy on the tale-telling common to sailor’s memoirs; detailed chronologies to serve as a “hydrographic reference” (Dawson 1883, esp. [iii]; Tizard 1900); and narrative history (Ritchie 1967). Such work has maintained a clear divide between the romantic pre-history of the modern chart (Blewitt 1957; Robinson 1962) and the more organized and scientific work of the post-1800 hydrographic surveys.

This general pursuit of internal institutional history extends to the modern concern for the history of international cooperation among geodesists. A number of articles in the professional literature have rehearsed the narrative of how a memorandum to the Prussian government by General Johann Jacob Baeyer (1794–1885) led to the formation first of the mitteleuropäische Gradmessung and then of the International Association of Geodesy (Baeyer 1861; see Buschmann 1994; Torge 2007, 213–40), and how that association has weathered the fraught history of international relations over the long course of the twentieth century. This literature is integral to the self-organization and perpetuation of an intellectual community of geodesists that is too rarified to be sustained at a national level (Tardi 1963; Levallois 1980; Torge 1993, 1996, 2005, 2012, 2015; Beutler et al. 2004; Drewes and Ádám 2016, 2019).

In the USA, the role of exploration in the country’s westward expansion, combined with the fact that federal survey organizations—first the US Coast Survey and also the geological surveys of the post-Civil War era—were a major site of scientific activity for much of the nineteenth century, gave rise to a particular concern among US historians of science for the intersection of science and government, in which the surveys featured prominently. The connection was initially made by the historian of mathematics, Florian Cajori, via his interest in the work on the US Coast Survey by his follow Swiss emigré, Ferdinand Hassler (Cajori 1929; Cajori 1930), and expanded significantly after World War II (e.g., Dupree 1957; Manning 1967; Daniels 1972; Kevles 1978).

General Histories of Surveying

Modern geodesy has further encouraged general historical accounts of geodesy, both dynamic and geometrical. Some of the earlier accounts in this vein have taken a broad view of surveying and mapping, as in the general history of surveying in Germany by Wilhelm Jordan (1842–99) and Karl Steppes (1882) [n4] and the history of surveying and terrestrial photogrammetry by Aimé Laussedat (1898). Others have focused more specifically on geometric and dynamic geodesy, ranging from General George Perrier’s Petite histoire de la géodesie (1939) [n5] to a number of later twentieth-century accounts (e.g., Bachmann 1965; Levallois 1988; Danson 2006; Boccaletti 2019). The emphases in the latter have inevitably varied depending on their authors’ particular interests, but there is a definite narrative common to all of them. Thematically, these works tend to emphasize three or four periods: first, the initial ancient Greek recognition that the earth is spherical and then Eratosthenes’ determination of its size; second, the heroic work of the French in the eighteenth century to solve the issue of the earth’s figure, whether flattened or elongated (e.g., Perrier 1908; Smith 1986); third, the development of the international trigonometrical networks, beginning with Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve’s great meridional arc from the Arctic to the Black Sea (1816–55) and  then the mitteleuropäische Gradmessung; and, fourth, the more pronounced geophysical work of the modern era, especially with the rise of modern satellite measurements of gravity. There has also, as might be expected, something of a nationalistic flavor to these internal studies of geodesy, with the French emphasizing French work (Perrier 1908; Levallois 1988), the Germans German work (Galle 1924; Buschmann 1994; Torge 2007), and so on.

Beyond institutional and general histories, practicing and academic geodesists and surveyors have undertaken a variety of internal historical studies that have revolved, in various ways, around the progressive nature of surveying. Both general textbooks on surveying, beginning with works such as Ágoston Tóth’s (1869)[n6] manual of topography, with its historical introduction (see Papp-Váry 1983), and more especially on geodesy (e.g., Smith 1997, 1–26; Torge 2017) contain brief summary histories of their subject matter that emphasize their development and essential function within modern society. As with the historical introductions in cartographic textbooks, discussed in detail below, these accounts have served to position the student at the forefront of a progressive science where they are poised to make their own contributions to an ongoing, forward-looking communal endeavor. None have adopted a sociocultural perspective to consider the ways in which surveying is a major constituent in creating and sustaining capitalism and modern states (Rose-Redwood 2004).

More precise historical studies have addressed issues of particular importance to each community of surveyors. A useful guide to the kinds of these issues is the listing of historical presentations to the congresses and working weeks of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) in 1985–2009, in a 2010 report on the activities of the federation’s permanent institution, the International Institution for the History of Surveying and Measurement (IIHSM). This review reveals persistent interests in remarkable individuals and their surveys, the evolution of geometry and mathematics and their application to surveying techniques, and the evolution and progressive improvement of surveying instruments (Graeve and Smith 2010, esp. 8, 28–31). The emphasis in all this work is on the taking of angular and linear measurements across the earth, and on their combination within organized surveys. The drafting of the maps is of much less importance, being generally understood as an algorithmic reduction of those measurements to paper.

The choice of subject matter by internal historians of surveying is generally related to their particular experiences and concerns. British surveyors have long paid homage to the Ordnance Survey, yet with little interest in the history of the property and engineering mapping, save for a history of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (Thompson 1968). By contrast, the historically recent process of property creation in the colonies settled by the British has sustained a persistent interest among local surveyors in the work and instruments of their predecessors during the colonial era and independence. In the USA, for example, land surveyors have been especially interested in the origins and practices in particular states (Uzes 1977; Hughes 1979) of the rectangular surveys of the General Land Office (see White 1983; Minnick 1985).

Finally, a persistent interest for geodesists has been in evaluating old geodetic surveys. The heart of each investigation is the recalculation of an historical survey, much as geodesists have routinely carried out when absorbing an older survey into a new triangulation, as Cassini (1720) had done when working with Picard’s original survey of part of the Paris meridian. But now, looking back on surveys undertaken with instrumentation and techniques quite different from those of the later twentieth century, some geodesists have undertaken intellectual exercises to answer the question, just how good were those old surveys? To this end, they have recalculated old surveys using the modern statistical technique of least-squares analysis. Prominent examples include N. D. Haasbroek’s (1968, 1972, 1974) studies of the triangulations undertaken in the Netherlands, James Smith’s (1986) general reassessment of early modern geodetic surveys through 1750, and more subtle reconstructions of triangulations by early surveyors (e.g., Leenders and Graeve 2012).

The interest of historians of mathematics has extended, on occasion, to histories of lesser, more common kinds of surveying. The two classic English-language texts on early modern surveying were both written by US professors of mathematics, Edmond Kiely (1900–88) and A. W. Richeson (1897–1966) (Kiely 1947; Richeson 1966). Both works read as a history of published manuals and instrumentation, and in this respect merge with the interests of historians of technology, navigation, and of the early modern “mathematical practitioners” who sought to apply geometry to all aspects of life. There are several chapters on maps and navigation in Charles Singer’s multivolume History of Technology (in vol. 3, Singer et al. 1957; and Taylor 1957; vol. 4, Skelton 1958; vol. 5, Fryer 1958), and there has been a consistent internalist concern with the astronomical and horological question of the determination of longitude at sea (e.g., Marguet 1917; Chapin 1952; Howse 1980). By far the largest body of work in these regards is that of the distinct community of historians of technology and museum curators concerned with preserving scientific instruments, such as Maurice Daumas (1953), J. A. Bennett (Bennett and Brown 1982; Bennett 1987), and Silvio Bedini (1975, 1986 [1966], 2001), and also instrument manufacturers, notably Charles Smart (1962; see Skerritt 1996).

Overall, the internal pursuit of the history of geodesy and surveying has established an apparently single, universal process of the observation and measurement of the earth and its features practiced from ancient Greek and Hellenistic antiquity to the present. Over time, knowledge of the earth, its shape, and its features have been determined with ever greater precision and accuracy. The changing intellectual foundations of surveying—the reconceptualization of the earth from a plane to a sphere to a regular spheroid to an irregular geoid—make manifest the rise and achievements of Western civilization. Surveying itself is presented as a tool of civilization, a technology necessary if states and marketplaces are to develop any degree of complexity and sophistication. Thus, the title page to the FIG-IIHSM application to UNESCO to grant world heritage status to the entire Struve arc featured a vignette from the title page of Aaron Rathborne’s The Surveyor (1616), explicitly construing early modern property mapping to have been the lineal precursor to nineteenth-century high geodesy (Ratia et al. 2004, 2) (see image in the blog roll). From this perspective, all surveying activities are simply manifestations of a Platonic ideal of measurement, destined to get ever closer to perfection.

Such a progressivist and presentist perspective perhaps makes inevitable an historical awareness. As the geographer and map maker Clements Markham (1830–1916) opined early in the twentieth century:

The foundation and basis of geography is the work of surveying and of map-making. Such work is attractive, because a great part of it must be done in the field, and because it carries us back in imagination to its gradual development, and to thoughts of what we owe to those who have gone before us. While we are working with theodolites and sextants exquisitely graduated by machinery, our thoughts ought to go back to the great men of old who turned out work almost as good as ours without those aids. Our curiosity should be aroused, and we should seek to know with what means they achieved their successes, and in what way their appliances were developed and improved until we became the inheritors of their labours and discoveries. (Markham 1905, 594)

These sentiments apply for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, when surveyors continued to use refined versions of instruments long used by surveyors and geodesists.

But what happens when radically new instrumentation is introduced? Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a decline in interest among current practitioners in older instrumentation with the widespread adoption of digital-based technologies after 1980. First, laser-equipped “total stations” reduced the once elaborate protocols for using different survey equipment to an almost point-and-click level of simplicity, then of high-precision GPS (global positioning systems), and still more recently of sophisticated drones. In particular, several US dealers in surveying and other mathematical instruments have indicated to me, since the turn of the last century, that the demand for old instruments has declined significantly as surveyors have less and less experience with the older kinds of instrumentation, with theodolites and levels, with chains and tapes, with barometers and plane tables. [n7] Even so, if geodesists’ recent historical work is indeed representative of the larger communities of land surveyors, internal interest in other aspects of surveying history seems not to have substantially abated with the rise of digital technologies. Surveyors’ professional needs to relate their own work to previous surveys has required them all to maintain an interest in the institutions, quality, and techniques of their predecessors.

Notes

n1. “Nous n’avons pas besoin de dire que les mesures des anciens doivent être regardées comme très-fautives, attendu l’imperfection des méthodes & des instrumens dont ils se servoient; mais nous avons cru que le lecteur verroit avec plaisir le progrès des connoissance humaines sur cet objets.”

n2. However, Haasbroek (1968, 79–84, esp. 83–84) found that van Musschenbroek had actively falsified his reworking of Snellius’s triangulation, so that the recalculation must be “fully condemned” as “entirely unreliable and contrasts very badly with the faithful work carried out by Snellius a century earlier.”

n3. “L’homme a trouvé dans l’astronomie, dans la correspondance du ciel & de la terre, la méthode de mesurer le monde, sans abandonner sa patrie, & presque sans sortir de ses foyers.”

n4. I have been quite unable, working from home through the internet, to find even birth and death dates for Karl Steppes.

n5. On [Anton François Jacques Justin] Georges Perrier (1872–1946), see Tardi (1946).

n6. Ágoston Rafael Tóth (1812–89) was an Hungarian military engineer. He fought in the unsuccessful revolution, 1848–49, and was jailed until the 1856 amnesty; after the reinstatement of civilian government (1867), he founded the topographic department of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (predecessor of the Honvéd Mapping Institute).

n7. Plane tables and chains were already thoroughly antiquated when I was taught their use in 1980–81 as a highly effective way to instill the basic geometries of field surveying in the student.

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