AMERICAN SURVEY MONUMENT PATENTS - My Latest Book

Congratulations. With that many pages, it must represent an enormous amount of work.

I have to wonder from all the accomplishments, are there multiple Jerry Penrys or do you not need sleep?

You just made a sale. Do I get it autographed?

What.. no truck axles or cotton spindles? 🙂

I would love to have a copy but I'm kind of moneyed out right now.

When I first started this project I would make frequent trips to the Engineering Library at the University of Nebraska where I would page through United States Patent books looking for the monuments. While there were indexes to the books, you never really knew what someone chose to call their invention. Some were simply called "Metal Stake" while others were called "Land Markers" and everything in between. Each had to be examined to see if it actually pertained to survey monuments. The 'land markers' were almost always a device used while planting that showed where the next row of crops should be placed, but some where survey markers.

Eventually, the U. S. Patent Office made the patents available online, but their site is not very user friendly when searching by name. Within the past few years Google has developed a site even better than the U. S. Patent Office which enabled me to find a few more patents.

My biggest problem was the condition of the patent drawings. Some were absolutely horrible in condition and had thousands of lines or speckles on each drawing and worse yet, on the text pages. Many resembled something that had been photocopied 10,000 times. I scanned every page at high resolution and then meticulously removed all the specks, lines, and even rebuilt some of the drawings and text. This was the main reason this project took so long is that I had hundreds of hours in this and truthfully could not always stay focused on getting it completed due to the enormity of it. I wanted to produce something that was crisp and pleasing to the eye. Many patent drawings were also slightly rotated and some had the headings straight, but the drawings or text was skewed. This gave me fits because I had to cut many of them apart and recenter text.

Finally, I could not get a straight answer as to whether patent drawings and text are copyrighted material. There is huge disagreement on this and the U. S. Patent Office would never commit to saying one way or the other. The past 6 months has been tracking down the still living patent owners and seeking permission. This was rewarding in that I was able to hear personal stories from surveyors about how they wanted to make the surveying world a better place.

Both covers show below. The book is 1" thick.

I just placed my order. This looks to be interesting. Congrats on finishing a long and tedious project.

Interesting topic. I expect it bought a few surprises
Curious. Did the designs come from any official concepts or requisites? Or did the designers setout to make their own mark and stamp their footprint on the surveying profession?

Most of the early designs appear to be original concepts. Two of the earliest in the 1880's were by Theodore Wagner, the Surveyor General of California. Wagner also had an unpatented design. Wagner complained to the GLO that the natural monuments being built were not lasting. The earliest design I found in 1869 was by a deputy surveyor working in the Dakota Territory who likewise complained that stones, stakes or pits and mounds were very short-lived and that no one would be able to find his monuments in the ensuing years. It appears that many of the people getting the patents wanted to be in place when the GLO decided to start using durable monuments.

The theme generally was that they were made of a durable material such as iron, they could be lettered or stamped with the appropriate markings, and that a piece of the monument would remain in place if pulled out or broken off.

There are some innovative construction staking patents such as a hub with crossed lines on the top and sides spaced at 0.01' increments so the rodman could quickly tack the hub if the instrumentman said to come in 0.02' and go left 0.02'. likewise in bluetopping the hub could be visually pounded down by watching the side lines. One guy patented sleeves that would go over the tops of lath with pre-marked cut and fills on them. Another guy patented a roll of consecutive numbers that could be used to mark traverse points. Others sought to have a canister inside where papers could be left describing the location or other pertinent information. Many other patents had so many working parts to them that they would have never worked very long after being placed due to corrosion. It makes one wonder what they were thinking. The innovative spirit of the surveyor I guess.

Thanks for detailed response.
Sounds like a well researched and rewarding outcome.
We don't have anything like that here.
The nearest was a few years back when PVC pegs started to show themselves but they never took off. Well not around where I've been. Haven't seen a single one.
Other than that, it's anything we care to lay our hands on, obviously with durability and permanence in mind.
If it's boundary peg (wood) has to be 75 mm square, 450 long. Similarly iron bars etc of similar length.
Wooden pegs were always regulated.
Town pegs were 75 mm, rural 100 mm square.
State Permanent Marks (SPM's) however were strictly controlled and were traditionally cast brass mushrooms let into concrete or rock.
Nowadays stamped brass discs with a centre screw. Don't quite have the same aesthetic appeal as early ones.

Richard - Much of the government surveys here were near worthless long term as far a monumentation goes. I work in an area where stones were placed in the 1850's and still find a lot of them, but the surveyors in the areas where wood stakes or pits and mounds were used have a lot of difficulty finding original monuments or even traces thereof. In the remote areas a lot of the work was simply fabricated and fictional on paper because it was contract work. The lack of a durable monument can be a direct link to this. The government kept saying it was "too expensive" to place durable monuments. When they went to the direct system where the government surveyors did the work, they started using iron monuments around 1908. In my state alone, Nebraska, there was over 300 townships (10,800 sections) redone at a tremendous cost to the taxpayer who had already paid for the work once. Funds ran out and there probably needed to be 300 more townships done.

An interesting sidenote is that the government didn't patent their monument designs, but at least two private individuals tried to later patent the same design that the government was using.

Snagged a copy! Thanks!

Got my copy the other day. The drawings are great...very nice work! :good:

Just ordered mine. Looking forward to getting it!
The monument that screws into the ground looks interesting!!

That little ball marked "d" in the last image is a glass ball that was supposed to stay with the monument as it was screwed into the ground. Then if someone took the monument out, the glass ball would remain as a memorial. Imagine trying to find one of those!

Good work!

&

Thank you for bringing the word 'monumentation' into the English lexicon.

It annoyed me that dictionaries, spell checks and others did not recognize the word.

I think I will pick mine up personally in a couple weeks. Can't wait to see it Jerry!

Samuel Bonner's design of 1877 consisted of a cap threaded inside a cavity from which a weighted wire with spring was attached. The spring would hold messages and could be pulled out by the wire. A drain hole at the bottom of the cavity allowed moisture to escape.

Bonner claimed that his invention would work especially well in areas 'infested' by Indians. Bonner was from Newaygo, Michigan.

Bonner's design reminds me of my RFID idea for monument caps, like the turnpike IDs for your car.

I believe we will eventually be able to imbed the chips in our survey caps and a DC will be able to read the data in a jiffy.

If you couldn't put a whole drawing on the chip, you could at least provide a URL where more info about the monument (and survey) could be obtained. B-)

We are almost there. Frederic Bauchot's patent in 2013 (for IBM) has an RFID tag embedded in the cap. I believe that Berntsen got their patent a few weeks ago for something very similar. Ken Walter of Pasco, WA, developed an early system of reading data from a survey monument in 1998. Bauchot's design is shown below.

Received my autographed copy today!

It's going to be fun perusing this to see some of the wacky ideas!

Thanks Jerry.