Posted
on February 21, 2014
Have
you heard of phototopography? How about photogrammetry?
Yeah,
me neither! Actually, even my spell checker hasn't heard of the first
one!
But
actually, this field (which has two names, and which was first perfected by today's birthday
boy) is really important—and even something we take for granted:
It
is the use of photography to make maps.
Some
descriptions of photogrammetry say that it is a non-contact method of making maps. In the past, people had to actually walk or sail in
order to survey land, in order to make the measurements that assured
that the map would be fairly accurate and therefore useful.
Who
was Deville?
Born
in France, Edouard-Gaston Deville attended naval school, served in
the French navy, and learned about surveying. He moved to Canada at
age 25 and began to work as a surveyor and astronomer. He was quickly
promoted to top surveyor, and for many years he directed Canadian
surveying activities.
So,
you know what Canada is like, right? It is the second largest nation
in the world, after Russia, and a lot of it is high mountains or
remote Arctic lands. At the time that Deville developed new surveying
techniques, in the late 1800s, there was no Google Earth or satellites in space, of
course, and even the airplane hadn't yet been invented. However,
photography was nearly half a century old and was revolutionizing
many aspects of life. Deville wanted to use it to survey Canada's
mountains in a faster, cheaper way.
He
had to design a rugged but lightweight field camera that could be
carried up to the top of a mountain. Once the camera was in place on
a mountain peak, the surveyors pointed the camera at the horizon and
took panoramic photos of the nearby peaks. Each photo shot was
carefully recorded with a measurement of the angle of the camera to
the survey station. Surveyors did all their measurements and took all
their photos during the short Canadian summers, and during the longer
winters they would make their calculations and draw their maps. The
first such mountain survey was started in 1886.
It
turned out that, not only were these techniques much faster than
traditional surveying techniques—and cost only about a third as
much—the results were more accurate. Soon Deville became a
sought-after expert in mountain surveying, and people all over the
world asked his advice, read his pamphlets and textbook, and copied
his camera and techniques.
As
you can imagine, when air flight became possible, surveyors could use
Deville's camera to create aerial photos. This helped Canadian
surveyors accurately map the flat-but-remote northern areas of the
nation.
 |
| This is Mount Deville, named for today's birthday boy. It is in Yoho National Park in Canada--and, oh, my!--is that place GORGEOUS!!! |
- Check out these child-drawn maps created in the 1700s and 1800s. Students often carefully copied and colored maps in order to learn geography. Do you think the parts that don't match modern maps are inaccurate because the kids were—you know—just kids, or do you think that they were pretty accurate copies of what people knew back then?
- National Geographic offers a tool called MapMaker Interactive.
- Use Google Earth to create a map of your own neighborhood.
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