Early USGS Survey Methods

If you send your email address to me I have some good pdf's of the early methods.

I don't have any direct answer but this article opens my eyes a bit:
http://www.papainternational.org/history.html

The first time aerial photos were used for mapping was during WWI by the British when they flew oblique aerial photos of Ottoman Turkish Forts in the Palestine. The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing was founded in 1934. By that time, it was common for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to use aerial photography for crop inventory purposes as well as for monitoring erosion by the Soil Conservation Service. The USGS was doing topographic mapping in the early 1930s.

Before photogrammetric mapping was done, USGS and USC&GS did all of their mapping with planetable & alidade. USGS did some third-order triangulation, mostly traverses with transit & tape. The Corps of Engineers did second- and third- order triangulation along navigable rivers, especially the Mississippi River after 1876.

Most of the early 15-minute USGS Quadrangles were hand-engraved maps.

My understanding was that there a cooperative arrangement made between USGS and Tennessee Valley Authority back in the early 1930's to really develop photogrammetry. TVA had been directed to stop the devistating floods along the TN River and when they looked at how long it would take to map the necessary land w/ the current technology it was going to decades. So something had to be done. They turned to photogrammetry.

TVA created Brown Books for all the major projects they built in the early years and they created a Brown Book for the Maps & Surveys process. In that book there are several chapters discussing the process to create mapping from aerial photography.

In addition to the aerial mapping the book describes many other pioneering processes used to create several dams along the Tennessee River. Things like property acquisition, boundary painting, appraisals, etc.

Due to the mission of TVA we were always involved in sharing these processes with the public and other national and international agencies. So in 1944 A film was made for presentation at the Pan American Institute of Geography and History Meeting which shows these processes in detail. Some clips from that film were recently found and turned into mpg video files. At the 2010 Surveyor's Historical Society meeting one of my colleagues presented this video along w/ a powerpoint and notes (the video is color but no sound).

One of the interesting things discussed at SHS was that early on we used German made equipment but late in the 30's and early 40's we no longer had that resource and turned to (I believe it was ) Bausch for optical equipment. During WW2 TVA also played an important role by using the techniques developed to map the valley to map most of Europe.

If someone would be willing to host a 200 mb zip file that contains a number of .mpg videos I'd be willing to share the files.

Whilw not specifcally addressing USGS methods "Higher Surveying" by Breed and Hosmer has a section on Filling in Topographic Details that runs about 100 pages. One section I found of particular interest that does quote USGS is titled Relation of Geology to Topography.
The edition I'm looking at is 7th, but he has the same info in older editions.
If you're interested Powells Books online used to have them regularly for $10-$20.
With all our modern geewhiz equipment I think we sometimes miss the essential basics of surveying. It's fun and instructive to remind ourselves of how it was done in earlier times.

DJJ

There is an interesting book that I have called "An American Topographer-The Working Years of George Stanley Druhot, 1914-1963" from Landmark Enterprises. ISBN 0-910845-25-5. It really tells a lot about the planetable methods and then later photogrammetry.

http://www.amazon.com/American-Topographer-Working-George-Stanley/dp/0910845255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307742039&sr=8-1

Amazing that they could map such large areas using a planetable. Even more so if you have ever used a planetable.

Not exactly an answer to your question, but here is a film I found on YouTube about the Inter-American Geodetic Survey, which shows some methods of mapping done in South America.

I found out about the IAGS in the early 1980's as a new survey tech in the US Army Corps of Engineers when I read a 1959 National Geographic Article about their work in South America. While in college, I went on a tour of DMA in DC, and was told they had an adviser in many of the South American Countries, and an opening at the time in Peru. When I graduated in 1986, I applied to DMA, with my goal being to work for the IAGS as an in-country adviser. Unfortunately, DMA gave me a rating as a cartographer rather than as a geodesist. About a year later I was finally rated as a geodesist, but by then was well on my way in the private sector, working for one of the first firms in the world to be doing GPS surveys.

The IAGS was disbanded in the early 90's I believe. Probably a few old timers lurking around here who spent some time there?

Thank you for all the responses. I have been working with some historical USGS quads that were recently recovered from storage.

1914 to 1936 vintage.

I called into Virgina and spoke with a man at USGS about obtaining additional historical quads. Turns out you just call them up, tell them the quad name, they check their database and let you know what quads were issued for that area. For $20 they either mail you out a hard copy or a digital copy via. CD.

He said that within 2 years they plan on having ALL 250,00 of their mapping products for California scanned AND georeferenced AND online for the public!!

I was impressed.

Turns out he was familiar with my county in California, he named off a few small towns and said he used to spend alot of time here. What a small world we live in.

Below is a 1914 quad that I scanned and adjusted to fit mountain peaks. The hillshade and streams are from modern USGS quads (the best check we have). The roads are submeter. Granted it has been stretched and massaged (approx. 250'), but it does give you an idea. It is clear that where they could see, the countours fit fairly well. In the areas they could not see, they might have faked it.

At any rate, the guy at USGS directed me the the 1913 edition of the "Topographic Instruction of the United States Geological Survey". He said he had a well worn copy that had been handed down by retiring employees. I searched Google Books and sure enough it had been scanned!! I printed it out for our library and will start reading it tonight. It actually looks very interesting.

Here is a tiny tidbit to get you interested.

"For mounting cross wires a small bottle containing shellac dissolved in alchol, a pinch of beeswax, and a pair of dividers or a forked stick are needed. The best spider web is, of course, a freshly spun one from a small spider, for this will be both clean and elastic; but as spiders are not always available, it is well to keep on hand a spider cocoon. Such a cocoon will furnish webs enough to last for years, although with age the threads become stiff and brittle and therefore more liable to break from a jar to the instrument. Most webs taken from grass or brush are rough, course, and dirty. the most convenient way to prepare a web is as follows;......"

I had posted a photo of a shiny USGS bench mark a couple weeks ago. It was set in 1921. I now have the quad that goes with it (surveyed 1922, 1923). Kind of cool connecting the dots. JRL

Here is an excellent source on the USGS mapping methods:
USGS Circular 1341

Kurt

I worked with (but not for) the IAGS in Central America on and off for a few years. By the time I got involved the IAGS was being merged into the Defense Mapping Agency International Divison and was losing it's unique identity. The old timers however still very much thought of themselves as IAGS.

You can read about it here:

http://northingeasting.blogspot.com/2011/01/inter-american-geodetic-survey.html