When did the thin stretchy plastic flagging come into use? What was it like before? What was in use in, say, 1958 and 1984?
According to wikipedia, vinyl was invented in 1926. I would bet that plastic survey tape was an early use for vinyl.
I don't really know when plastic flagging became available, but around here most surveyors used strips of cloth until the late '60s. I'm sure it was in use and available before then.
I think it was '69 or '70 before the crews I worked on started carrying plastic flagging on a regular basis.
Memory:
The field 'truck' was a '61 or '62 Ford station wagon. The rear seat faced backwards and, for ventilation, the rear window was usually rolled down. That seat was always occupied by me and the other rodman on the crew.
Returning from a job one hot summer evening the fella next to me picked up an almost full roll of flagging, wrapped a little of the loose end around his hand and flung the roll out the rear window as we cruised down the highway.
There was a spectacular spiral of 300' of red flagging swirling in the vortice of that old Ford...for a few seconds, then it snapped from its own weight.
The PC started cussin' (he was REALLY good at that) and whipped the wagon around. He made us both get out to 'roll it back up'. I was laughing, wondering how two guys could roll flagging back up efficiently. He didn't think it was so funny.
Here in central PA around 1967 +- I worked for and old surveyor/engineer. He obtained large boxes of the end of bolts of red material from a local ladies garment factory. Rainy day fill in time we cut 12" to 18" strips. That was some tough material, you could not tear it. We always had a bunch stuffed in our pockets while in the field. I found some of those strips 20+ years later where we marked line, faded, but still tied to hemlock branches.
My first job on a survey crew was in 1970. We had access to plastic flagging for "special" occasions but not every day use. Of course, the office manager who doled it out was a little martinet, so that might have had something to do with the rationing.
We were still painting lath for "everyday" use. We had a piece of pipe welded to a plate so the pipe was vertical. We’d fill it with yellow paint, dip the lath in and lay them on a rack to dry. I would say it was about 1972 before we quit painting lath and started using plastic for everything.
When I started surveying in 1954 we used muslin. In 1955-1957 when working in Minnesota & South Dakota surveying buried telephone cable routes, we used to cut bolts of colored crepe paper into strips, tore off what we needed from the strip and tied them on lath, fences, corn stalks, fence posts, etc. We used the roll flagging in 1959 at a firm I worked for in Casper, Wyoming, but it really was something new and had just began to be used about then. In 1960 when I went to work for the Bureau of Reclamation we used muslin until about 1962 or 1963 and then started using the roll flagging for everything except our big banners for P.O.T.'s and P.I.'s for long sights on transmission line surveys or section line retracements on corner monuments and used colored muslin or cloth stapled to lath nailed onto a 2x2x8' set on a 2x2 hub or the corner monument guyed with tie wire.
The bolt of red served more than one purpose one for which plastic is no substitute when there is no TP in the truck. How's that for history?
If you have access to old ACSM bulletins at a university library, you'll see the plastic flagging being advertised in the early 1960's. I was doing research a few years back at the engineering library at the University of Nebraska and remember seeing a color ad. I was surprised at the early date myself.
:good: :-O
As an aside, the deer in central Idaho had an affinity for certain colors of flagging (can't remember which colors) and would eat them down to a nubbin where the knot was. It meant time consuming searches for the nubbins when recovering "P" line (flagged branches and bushes only) set by others who used the wrong color flagging.
