George wrote:
>Thomas Jefferson's father surveyed Virginia, George Washington worked as a
>surveyors apprentice, and Abraham Lincoln was a surveyor.
TJ was a surveyor, too. And to think that they did all their work,
trigonometry and closure corrections and all without calculators, and with
plane compass on a "Jacob's staff" and chains, to boot!
The old fashioned transit as we know it was not invented until in 1797-1798
by Andrew Ellicott, brother of Joseph Ellicott who surveyed the western
section of New York for the Holland Land Company.
The may not have been as precise as we can be today, but they were accurate.