The California Surveyor - CLSA

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
By LeRoy C. "Lee" Hennes, PLS
This issue of the Cal Surveyor
will feature several articles on
advanced technologies. Our
profession has come a long way. In
recent times we have seen more advancement
in the way we do our
craft than in all the time since those
early Babylonian surveyors set their
first boundary stones. When many
of us started our careers, we used an
open-faced transit and a steel tape to
make measurements and did our calculations
by hand using logarithmic
trig tables. We felt that we understood
what we were measuring, how
the tools that we used functioned,
and the nature of our calculations.
Today we measure distance indirectly
with an EDM, spanning miles
by measuring the travel time of light
waves and our calculations are done
within computer microchips, whose
inner workings are unseen and mysterious.
Our measurements and computations
are assumed correct more
as an act of faith than an observation
of physical reality.
These changes probably started in
1959 when Coordinate Geometry
(COGO) was devised by Dr. Charles
Miller at M.I.T. as a systematic way
of doing roadway design computations
on a relatively new gadget
called an electronic computer. His
COGO program ran on an IBM 1620
mainframe, a machine that filled a
room and could store 99 points
within its 8000 bytes of memory.
Today's handheld calculator can
greatly outperform that first machine.
Computers took the drudgery out of
computation and measurement, but
somewhere along the way some of
us lost our ability to understand the
meaning of the results so easily produce.
We now get answers to 14
decimal places, assume their indisputable
accuracy, and proceed to call
the 2-inch iron pipe set by another
surveyor as being 1 MOO of a foot out
of position.
When we chained in the position
of a pipe by hand, we "felt" the
measurement and when it was close
to the recorded distance, common
sense prevailed and the position of
the monument was accepted. In the
computer age, we can no longer
"feel" our measurements. With the
relative ease of calculations, we tend
to compute before thinking. Decisions
that were once intuitive must
now be based upon error theory and
statistics, academic subjects not included
in our out-dated apprenticeship
system of training surveyors.
We now seem to teach only how to
push the buttons and not how to
professionally evaluate results.
In the nineteenth century it was
thought that any town that wanted
to be of consequence had to have a
blacksmith. He designed, built, and
repaired all the gadgets the people
needed. A blacksmith was an integral
and respected member of the
community. Times changed and so
has technology. The "Village
Smithy" has vanished. He was replaced
by machines he did not
understand, technologies that made
him irrelevant.
Ever more imposing technologies
are within the grasp of surveyors
like Land Information Systems and
the Global Positioning System.
These technologies are being
developed by other professions. We,
as surveyors, should be taking the
lead, but we as a group lack the
necessary scientific training. Our
collective stubbornness and pride
will not permit us to accept that a
college level education is needed if
we are to provide leaders who can
develop new technologies and practitioners
who can advise others on
their use. Sure, we can learn to push
the buttons, but that is really the
role of a technician, not a professional.
We should not be relying on
others to define our future.
In order for us to define the buttons
to be pushed, we must, like
many other states, redefine ourselves
as a truly learned profession and
embrace the necessity of a college
level education to give us a good
it
Surveyors
should not
be the
blacksmiths
of this century.
We should not
allow our
tools to
replace us."
foundation and continued professional
development to update our
skills. Surveyors should not be the
blacksmiths of this century. We
should not allow our tools to replace
us. After all, you could think
of the first mechanical engineer as
being a blacksmith with vision. Will
we have the collective vision and
will to remold our profession?
6 The California Surveyor Fall 1992