While driving down the road the other day my daughter noticed those guys you see standing on the roadside one of them holding a pole with some apparatus on top that one could look through. He was peering through this apparatus and looking towards another person or some fixed object.
My daughter asked me what that man was doing and I had to confess ignorance saying, “I don’t know.”
So what was that man doing anyway?
He was surveying something–possibly trying to fix an exact location/height/depth.
And to respond like my adorable 3 year old, “But why and how?”
Her mother and I are so proud that she has graduated beyond the simple “Why?” questions and now demands to know How things work the way they do. Unfortunately, I often find myself at my intellectual limits.
They could have been using either of two instruments. One is a transit, which is generally used for determining either horizontal or vertical angles, and for setting a line or points on a surface. These points can be either exact or general. If the second guy was holding a rod with alternating red and white markings, the first guy was probably using a transit.
The second instrument is called a level and is used to determine elevations. Elevations are important for varying reasons, but some include depth of sewer lines, camber in roads, how much dirt needs to be hauled in (or out) in order to reach the desired elevation of a roadbed, etc. If the second guy was holding a rod with numbers all over it, or one with a gizmo on top, then a level was probably being used.
Both instruments require a point of reference, obviously, in order to determine elevations and angles. Reference points on a project are set by using an established point or an established elevation to work from, usually from a more distant location.
Now this is very general, but hopefully will suffice for your inquisitive child.
In the UK, if you look up “Boring” in the yellow pages
(ie the business phone directory), it says “see Civil Engineers”.
(Well it did until recently)
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets. – author unknown
If they were lucky, they may have had what is known as total station, which is a computerised theodolyte and level. They’re amazing pieces of equipment. You can plug the into a lapotop, and creat a digitised make by pointing it at the reflective cristal in a staff, carried around by a “chain boy”. No more of the tedious trignometry nonsense.
Zorro, MEng ACGI.
Just a CIVIL ENGINEERS ROCK shout out here…
Yeah, we do!
FWIW, I haven’t seen any surveyors in the last few years who weren’t using total stations. (I’m a civil/environmental engineer.)
I can’t imagine any commercial endeavor that wished to stay in business would still be using transits and levels.
In fact, the latest trend (which hasn’t taken off yet completely) is robotic total stations that follow the rod man. (No, they don’t walk around–the laser head on the station just swivels to automatically track the rod.) As the controls are on the rod, this decreases the manpower required for surveying from two to one.
Hey, just trying to be helpful. I haven’t actually done any surveying since the Stone Age. The definition of a surveyor that I last heard was "people who hike into the woods pounding sticks into the ground so they can find their way back.
Yes, I have a brother who’s one and I’m glad of it!
Just recalling my surveying class from graduate school makes me want to curl up into a ball and die. God how I hated that class. “But I can’t get it to close…how ‘bout I just fudge it by…I don’t know, say 500’…”
An’ that’s why you’re a Planner. 
[sub]psst… just how many colored pencils does one guy need anyway ?!?!?!? [/sub]
and Thank You tramp. We’re invisible to most folks, you know.
Hey, what’s wrong with planners? Go back to your green book, okay?
[nitpick]
Surveyors are rarely civil engineers
At least where I live, Land Surveying and Engineering are totally different professions. The only type of Civil Engineering that really touches on professional surveying to any extent is Geomatic Engineering
Heck, most people I know that actually survey are not even professional, commisioned surveyors. The profssionals are paid to sit behind a desk and sign off on the work that the actual field crews do.
Does this differ substantially in other locations?
bernse - Spouse of a Professional Engineer and Articling Professional Land Surveyor (yes, she’s both).
Well, separate but related. The National Council of Engineering Examiners (NCEES - hope I got it right!) is charged with administering the examinations for both P.E. and PLS. Typically each state in the US has a state Board of Registration which regulated PE’s and PLS’s.
I’m working with a friend of mine who’s a registered Professional Land Surveyor. One or two of his crew chiefs are also registered, but like you say bernse he has an office guy who stamps all of the work. The guy in question does go out into the field occasionally to check things.
Civil engineers take a course or two in surveying in college. We are expected to know enough about it to close a traverse, etc. so that we can work with the surveyor (whom we depend upon to provide us with data for our designs).
It’s not uncommon for the engineer charged with overseeing construction of a project to “take shots” with a level or transit on the job site. He/she is expected to know enough about surveying to check out the progress of the project.
I spent a year or two as a “rod man,” which sounds like what you’re calling a “chain boy.” I worked for two different surveying firms, both of which used total stations. Oddly, one of the best crew chiefs I worked with preferred to let me run the gun, and hold the rod himself, which I guess promoted me to “instrument man.” (There aren’t many women on field crews around here–one job I worked on, another crew from a different company was in radio range, and we could hear them. “That sounds like a woman on that other crew!” one radioed his partner. “Yep, it is,” I radioed back. That shocked them into silence–I guess it hadn’t ocurred to them that we could hear them, too.)
One of my bosses had a robotic gun, that followed you around, but he hardly ever went into the field alone, no idea why.
Anyway, I don’t see the “why” part answered yet (or else the caffiene hasn’t taken effect). Most of what I did was “Mortgage Inspection Reports,” a cursory survey of a property. We’d go to the county seat, get a description of the lot being bought and the markers in the subdivision, and determine just where the property lines were (relative to some monument in the subdivision–if you every see those X’s carved into curbs, that’s what they are, monumentation for surveying and marking locations. There are also “pipes” buried at the corners of some lots to mark the property corner, and a few other types). The crew locates the lot, determines the position of any buildings, and uses the measurements to produce a drawing of the lot. A boundary survey is similar, but more detailed.
Any time a property is sold, where I’m at, a survey is done. Then there’s surveying for road construction–taking profiles of a road so that construction crews know just how deep to dig, or how much dirt they need to add to the project.
We also staked out where foundations of new houses were to be poured, and did basic contour surveys of land that was about to be developed. The last one of those I worked on, the crew chief nearly cut his fingers off–a horsefly landed on his hand, and he swatted at it. He’d forgotten about the machete he was holding…
Anyway, it was kind of fun, but very hot in the summer.