Essay On History Of Surveying Equipment

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The topic I have chosen is the history of surveying level equipment and the types of surveying equipment. To start with ill go over the types of surveying equipment, in 1400 BC the Egyptians accurately divided the land to tax the people and created a rough draft of the plumb bob to determine if something is level by tying a rock to a beam and seeing if it fell straight down. Around 120 BC the Greeks used geometry to accurately divide the land and developed the diopter which is the first recorded surveying equipment since the Egyptians to help in dividing the land and developed standardized procedures to conduct the surveys. Later, chains were used to determine the distance and could be held taught to determine if something is level. Some other equipment that were used were solar compasses, compasses, and transit; the compass was used to determine the direction of a line while the solar compass is used to measure the direction and the latitude, this can be used to find the true north of a particular place. Later as time passed and technology advanced the wheel came into use, there were two types of wheel that came into use the electrical and mechanical, while they ran in different ways they both worked in similar ways by rolling from the start to the end point. As the 1900s rolled around 2 main new tools came into play the planimeter, which was used to measure asymmetrical land area and eliminated the need for charts and manual calculations. The second tool that became popular was the theodolites, which consists of a movable telescope on a movable perpendicular axis and was used to measure horizontal and vertical angles. Steel tapes were used in early America were used because they were significantly more accurate than the cha...

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...h tech tools that are now used a lot of the final measurements are determined by the human eye. In the Industrial Age surveying became very important to deal with taxes and this is where the two methods came into play because geodetic were effective for a large area and took the terrain into account which was helpful for maps but plane surveying was more helpful in equally dividing up the land. Surveying became even more prominent as population grew and construction began to expand surveying for roads and bridges to just collect data as travel began to increase and ensure that the establishments could handle the new load that the increased population could handle and thus the tools began to advance dramatically from rod measurement to GPS to give more detailed reading to get further intelligence on the ground and distance more accurately using the new equipment.

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