I've been deep cleaning my office lately, albeit just a little at a time. This is the first time in 25 years...really.
I came across a couple of old field books in a box that I immediately recognized as "ancient". I placed them in the bookcase and went about my rooting around.
A few days later I sat down to check out these old books. The back half of one of the books was full of some very cryptic notes I didn't immediately recognize. I looked at the date; 1976. Hmmm..and I didn't recognize any names save mine. I got to thinking in 1976 I was down south working for a telecommunication company...and we really didn't use FBs. Then I read the notes a little more precisely. It all came back to me.
We were contracted by Bell Telephone to provide outside plant inventory records in some very rural areas in the Atchafalaya. Full records also included mapping, and that's why they hired me. In this kind work we would usually utilize available aerial info and any sort of Rube Goldberg field work that could provide drafted maps of buried and aerial telephone routes. Although the precision wasn't anywhere near "land surveying" spec it had to be representative enough to provide Bell employees a means to get to a specific pole or term can.
Down in the 'Chafalaya swamp one could easily get lost. Due to the particulars of the contract we weren't able to obtain any aerial photos. Due to annual flooding and subsequent road re-construction the available county maps were close to useless.
My notes were taken in a car. We had a mount for a "wheel" that would mechanically click off a measurement in feet (as long as you drove slow enough). I was equipped with a stopwatch and a surplus military Gurley compass. At a constant speed ( I remember 20 mph) I would record a heading and a length of time to approximate tangent (straight) sections of road. Curves were recorded with a 'heading in' and a 'heading out' and a span of time. At the end of each "route" I would read the measuring wheel for a total length. This was checked against our speed and elapsed time.
Of course there was a lot of error. We used the wheel distances as control and "rubber-banded" the courses into some semblance of accuracy. At night in the hotel room I would create coordinates with a TI-30. This info was forwarded to the drafting department in OKC. This was well before any sort of CAD was available to us.
I remember we did a couple of hundred miles of facility mapping in four or five months. Bell Telephone loved our maps and we repeated the process in several rural areas over a year or two. And although nowadays "dead reckoning" isn't really considered a field procedure, it was all we had...and it worked. Was it really surveying? You betcha.
