The previous post about the size of an acre reminded me I had sketched up an essay concerning just that some time back. This may have been published in some obscure surveying periodical, I just can't remember.
One thing I would like to remind all surveyors about is that Edmund Gunter was a mathematician, astronomer and geodesist. The invention of his "chain" was one of the least of his accomplishments. He would probably roll over in his grave if he knew we heralded so highly his constant-length stretch of rope.
A couple of other things Edmund gave us:
Gunter's quadrant:
An instrument made of wood, brass or other substance, containing a kind of stereographic projection of the sphere on the plane of the equinoctial, the eye being supposed to be placed in one of the poles, so that the tropic, ecliptic, and horizon form the arcs of circles, but the hour circles are other curves, drawn by means of several altitudes of the sun for some particular latitude every year. This instrument is used to find the hour of the day, the sun's azimuth, etc., and other common problems of the sphere or globe, and also to take the altitude of an object in degrees.
A rare Gunter quadrant, made by Henry Sutton and dated 1657, can be described as follows: It is a conveniently sized and high-performance instrument that has two pin-hole sights, and the plumb line is inserted at the vertex. The front side is designed as a Gunter quadrant and the rear side as a trigonometric quadrant. The side with the astrolabe has hour lines, a calendar, zodiacs, star positions, astrolabe projections, and a vertical dial. The side with the geometric quadrants features several trigonometric functions, rules, a shadow quadrant, and the chorden line.
And probably most notably,Gunter's scale:
Gunter's scale or Gunter's rule, generally called the "Gunter" by seamen, is a large plane scale, usually 2 feet (0.61 m) long by about 1½ inches broad (600 mm by 40 mm), and engraved with various scales, or lines. On one side are placed the natural lines (as the line of chords, the line of sines, tangents, rhumbs, etc.), and on the other side the corresponding artificial or logarithmic ones. By means of this instrument questions in navigation, trigonometry, etc., are solved with the aid of a pair of compasses. It is a predecessor of the slide rule, a calculating aid used from the 17th century until the 1970s.
In my mind I compare his scale with the old framing squares that had pitch and hypotenuses on them. An invaluable tool for the man that used it daily....Gunter's scale probably had more to do with the population of the western hemisphere than pitch oakum in the hulls. 😉
Back to Gunter's Chain. Being Clergy, Gunter was in charge of the King's land within his parish. It was the Clergy's duty to tax a portion of the peasant's farming harvest for the King. To be fair, Gunter devised a constant that could make the area calculation of a peasant's "truck-patch" fairly simple; the 1/10 furlong chain. The story of how it became a heavy piece of hardware is lost to time. I would bet, however, that is had something to do with how quickly a 66' long piece of rope would stretch or rot. The links, of course, being an option for the most picky of mathematicians. Most early chains were graduated in half and quarter.
Anyway, here's the 15 year old ditty from Uncle Paden's archives:
Keeping Up With The Jones
Keeping up with Jones is surely not an American invention. I believe it's human nature. I can almost bet you that some poor cave man got the "what for" from his wife because the Jones' cave next door was closer to the water... and we've been trying to keep up with them ever since.
Even though the desire to be "one up" has probably been with us humans for millenium, I think it has herded and guided us in greater ways unaware to us. Especially land surveyors. The very terms we use and our standard units of measure owe their existence to the fact that everybody wants a little more than everybody else.
These units of measure we use everyday have their roots in antiquity. And if you want to bore yourself with details, they've changed somewhat over the years. Take the furlong for instance. The furlong was historically viewed as being equivalent to the Roman stade (stadium), which in turn derived from the Greek system. In the Roman system, there were 625 feet to the stadium, eight stadia to the mile, and three miles to the league. A league was considered to be the distance a man could walk in one hour, and the mile (from mille, meaning 1000) consisted of 1,000 passus (paces, five feet, or double-step). After the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe continued with the Roman system, which the people proceeded to diversify. I'm sure this led to a fist fight or two at the local market. Things needed to be standardized.
Somewhere around the year 1300, by royal decree England standardized a long list of measures. Among the units of distance and length important to surveyors that were standardized were the foot, yard, rod(or pole), furlong, and the mile. The rod was defined as 5 1/2 yards or 16 1/2 feet, and the mile was eight furlongs, so the definition of the furlong became 40 rods and that of the mile became 5,280 feet (eight furlongs/mile times 40 rods/furlong times 16 1/2 feet/rod).
The furlong, a derivative of "furrow long", became a pretty standard measurement when it came to land measurement. An "acre long" became a common term describing a plowed field being a furlong in length and 4 rods in width. This was understood to be the amount of land that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a day. With it's origins buried in the linguistics of the time. Old English was æcer, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch akker and German Acker ‘field,’ from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit ajra ‘field,’ Latin ager, and Greek agros.
Besides its origins it became a standard aricultural unit of area measurement; a furlong by 1/10 of a fulong. A very important unit, I might add.
Among the rules and regs of the day that the poorly English peasant had to live by was the fact that he owned no land. Where he lived, ate and died was on land owned by the manor's lord. Whether a nobleman or the abbot of the local monastery, you paid the "man" rent. You see, in order to feed themselves and their families peasants had to get creative. One method was what was considered the open-field system. A property owner would allow someone to farm their land with the understanding a percentage of the crop would be paid to the land owner as rent.
Why so important? Because it allowed the poorest of peasants to survive. The English countryside was populated by plenty of peasants in these times. Very, very few of the populous was nobility; most were just working stiffs like the rest of us. But they needed to eat. Unless they had a secret berry patch they needed somewhere to grow a tater or two. Poaching game off a Lord's estate could probably bring a death sentence.
Share cropping was a very profitable business for property owners. Noble estates and monasteries freely allowed the poor folks to scratch their grain and veggie patches out of the dirt. With the land owner's cut, everybody was fat and happy. And the standard unit of measure? An acre. Each peasant sharecropper was presented their unit measure of land for each season. No more, no less. No doubt laid out each year by someone close to our position. The birth of modern land surveying had arrived. Different from mapping in the fact that precise areas were adhered to and required an honest application of equality for each area.
But what does this have to do with keeping up with the Jones? A lot. Just listen.
We now had a tangible area it took to provide a peasant family with their crop of foodstuffs. Large estate owners wondered exactly how big their place was. "From the river to forest" is not a real descriptive statement. Lords and Barons could now boast about the size of their holdings. And we all know how important "size" is to human males and I'm sure a few hundred years hasn't changed men much. Someone with a thousand acres could now be perceived as being able to have that many peasants indebted to them. Nothing better than sitting around your great hall quaffing ale with your buddies and bragging about how big a place you have. Area of land had been defined.
And of course the King picked up on this. Land taxes could now be levied in a logical manner. The more land you had, the more peasants you had working for you, the greater your income AND the greater your taxes.
So in a nutshell, the standard unit of land area we still cling to today is the common acre. And the acre is still, after all these years, a measure of boast when it comes to ownership. If you don't believe me, just ask a cattle rancher how big a place he owns. He won't tell you two square miles. He'll tell you 1280 acres.
Whether his name is Jones, or not.
That's interesting. I didn't realize that the chain was a derivative of the furlong.
And as someone posted earlier, that was a lot to plow with a single bottom breaker. Wouldn't happen in an eight hour day.
An acre is defined as 43,560 square feet when standardized, which came from 10 square chains, or as you stated a furlong by a tenth of a furlong. It also looks like an acre in it's early career was used as a measurement of length, and still is by some...
