As an undergraduate I was part of the original occupancy of the new campus
in Amherst, NY. One of the "buildings," the Ellicott Complex, (3000 beds,
libraries and a second story terrace connecting various towers and sections,
built like Mexico City on pilings in a former swamp by Davis Brody
architects) I guess named after the old fashioned transit inventor, then,
there ein Buffalo, NY.

Some of those earlier instruments I once saw at Sands Point, down the road
from the Helen Keller Institute, a former Gould family estate now a public
place on the former "Gold Coast" of Long Island (tours leave there in small
buses for the Great Gatsby "look" I imagine) were made of ivory and bone and
once used by the early Quaker surveyors of Hempstead and Hicksville appear
to be a variant of the "...planchette circulaire which was quite commonly
used in France during the seventeenth century...surely a development from
the theodelitus." Not the plane table, which "does not seem to have been
adopted for general use in England to the same extent as on the Continent."
The cited plane table is practically identical with "the simple form
employed today." pps. 231-2. Surveying Instruments: Their History," Edmund
R. Kelly, Ph.D., 1947, 1979, Carben Surveying Reprints, Columbus, Ohio. That
"planchette circulaire" looks much like the tripod sighting instrument in
the fire towers run by the US Forest Service.

George Myers