Technological Change in Surveying

Technological Change in Surveying

Over the years, there have been big changes in surveying equipment. When I started as a junior

or apprentice surveyor, we were using the old style, one-hundred-year-old equipment. That

shifted as soon as I started working professionally. The new equipment was essentially a transit,

a piece of equipment that had been used for years, but it was designed to read differently and was

much more precise.

Subsequently, a new transit was designed, which transferred information directly to the

computer; we call them total stations. You would measure distance electronically, press a button,

and you would get the distance down to millimetres.

Eventually, you did not have to have a reflector or need a second man to work with. You could

work by yourself anywhere. Anything you pointed the new transit at, the instrument would

measure the distance and tell you how far away it was down to the millimetre, and then it would

record it. These innovations made surveying so easy. A surveyor no longer had to pull a steel

tape across the road or anything like that. You could just look at any object from one position,

and it would calculate all the required positions.

The other innovation involved computers. It wasn’t until I had finished university in 1955 that I

first saw a handheld mechanical calculator. Up to that point, we had to do things longhand by

logarithms or just by multiplying on paper. When the first machines came into operation, they

were far too large to take into the field. Things progressed very quickly to a desktop mechanical

calculator of which I had several models (up to thirty-five digits). I remember how impressed we

were when they produced the first electronic handheld calculator.

I had the kind that was used to go to the moon, a Hewlett Packard 45. It was mind boggling what

it could do in comparison to what we had only a short ten or fifteen years earlier. That calculator

graduated to the laptop computer that we have today that just calculates everything. Surveying

developed further when accurate global positioning, GPS, came along, giving surveyors the

precise position of any place. So long as you could see the sky, you could pick up the position of

your instrument.

Luckily, when I first used GPS, I had a student with me who graduated from the University of

Calgary and had been trained in the new machines. We were the first ones in the area to use that

equipment. It was very handy in determining a boundary line that was sixteen miles long. The

line would go over the mountains and down the valleys and we did not have to chop up the line,

so you could see it. It just leapfrogged from point to point.

Also, simultaneous with all the modernization of the field equipment was the advent of plotting

machines. Up to that point, we needed an employee who was good at drafting and neat and tidy

and knowledgeable and who could do some of the calculations. The first plotting machine I had

was what is called a flatbed plotter. It could make drawings on a horizontal scale. The newer

ones are on a drum and allow you to make a drawing up to forty-eight inches wide and any

length. The machine draws whatever you ask it to. I was the only surveyor in the area who would

use different line weights to represent different features of the property, like creeks and roads and

street names.

Calligraphy changed, too. I remember working with a professional draftsman. He did a lot of the

printing and calligraphy—very pretty drawing. Both the quality of the drawing and the writing

was important. I know of two people who were told by a government agency that they had to

redo a drawing because their work was not good enough. One fellow decided to quit working. He

was older. The other fellow decided to hire somebody to make his drawings. The agencies,

specifically the federal government’s Land Branch, were particular about the quality of their

drawings. They wanted a standard type of print.

Surveying is not a very popular profession. There are still only the same number of professional

surveyors as there were when I started, and when I started there were no more than there had

been at the turn of the century. I have had a couple of fellows leave my employment because

they did not like the profession; it was too strict and regimented for them. There was zero

tolerance for mistakes, and most people did not want to become a surveyor. For many, it just was

not worth going through all the stress of getting through the exams and keeping track of the

work.

It is now more than twice as difficult to pass the exam as it was in my era. The association is

very, very demanding and sets its own exams. As I said, there is no tolerance for mistakes.

When I started, nobody was surveying highways, but then the government got smart and

budgeted for surveying when they built a highway, including a final wrap-up legal survey at the

end. They're not building any more highways in this part of the province. But my God, the

surveyors involved in the highways did a lot of work.