Two American Feet - Soon to be Only One

[Jim Koepke]

Odd little bit of strangeness from > https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/science/foot-surveying-metrology-dennis.html


How big is a foot? In the United States, that depends on which of the two official foot measurements you are talking about. If it comes as a surprise that there are two feet, how about this: One of those feet is about to go away.

The first foot is the old U.S. survey foot from 1893. The second is the newer, shorter and slightly more exact international foot from 1959, used by nearly everybody except surveyors in some states. The two feet differ by about one hundredth of a foot (0.12672 inches) per mile — that’s two feet for every million feet — an amount so small that it only adds up for people who measure over long distances.

In a few years there will be only one.

jtk

[Bill Dufour]

I know the Spanish used the vara. One for regular folks and a longer royal vara for the king so he got more for the same price.
Bil lD

[Rod Sheridan]

Odd little bit of strangeness from > https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/science/foot-surveying-metrology-dennis.html



In a few years there will be only one.

jtk

And it's actually metric as there is no Imperial standard for length............Rod.

[Jim Becker]

And it's actually metric as there is no Imperial standard for length............Rod.

Yea, true, but I hesitated to mention that. LOL It's a "passionate" thing around here!

[Steve Demuth]

25 hundred thousandths of an inch difference in the two. Guess that still doesn't explain how the property line between me and the neighbor got moved when he had it re-surveyed. ;-)

[Jim Koepke]

25 hundred thousandths of an inch difference in the two. Guess that still doesn't explain how the property line between me and the neighbor got moved when he had it re-surveyed. ;-)

Maybe they used Mt Vernon as the base line.

jtk

[Tom M King]

When Governor Spotswood convinced the Crown that the best way to prevent the French from closing off any expansion to the West was to populate it with English, they started giving (sort of) a 1,000 acres of land to anyone who wanted it. There were a few stipulations, but those weren't enforced.

To make it easier, if you could pass a simple test, you could register as a surveyor, and go mark off your own 1,000 acres of land. You can imagine that a "few" extra steps may have been added by mistake to a property line. When the next person came along, they went by your slashes on the noted trees, and of course, would not argue with a generous property line.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and there are still some of the same families owning those original parcels. If you were a neighboring descendant, or purchaser, and you ended up selling some number of acres, the deeds were for an amount of acreage now measured by dragging chains, or even modern theodolites. There was going to be some left over land. The holder of the original, undivided parcel now has a larger piece than they thought they had, because their new border is their neighbors accurately surveyed border. The trees with the slashes, and the high water mark of some creek, have long since moved on.

Around where I live, the remnants of this still exist. There is probably a total of property tax paid that is less than it could be, if everything was accurately measured.

Surveyors work today is very accurate. Around here, there is still a lot of it that has never been surveyed by accurate equipment, and some that has never even had chains dragged on it. There will be some surprises for a long time to come. I don't know how it is in other parts of the country that were settled later.

[Curt Harms]

SWMBO was a Realtor and historical property researcher. I grew up in the upper midwest that was mostly settled after the Homestead Act of 1862 so things are laid out in 1 mile squares for the most part. It's a LOT different here in S.E. Pennsylvania which was largely settled before 1800.

[Steve Demuth]

SWMBO was a Realtor and historical property researcher. I grew up in the upper midwest that was mostly settled after the Homestead Act of 1862 so things are laid out in 1 mile squares for the most part. It's a LOT different here in S.E. Pennsylvania which was largely settled before 1800.

Particularly in the more open areas of the midwest, the original surveying was astonishingly accurate, given the technology they used, and the conditions under which it was done. I live in the forested canyon country along the Mississippi in Iowa, and there - probably more like Pennsylvania. The deeds for the collection of 6 acre woodlots from which the property I live on was assembled are highly precise, but the actual markers in the field from which fences and thus defacto property lines were constructed can be pretty variable. It was darned difficult to accurately locate the corner between four properties when it is in a wooded area cut by canyons and bluffs with topographical variation of hundreds of feet on a single, subdivided 40 acre SW 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of Section 6, Township 1, Range 23 North (all made up numbers). My actual property description is an arbitrary subdivision of a "parcel" constructed from smaller subdivisions. It's a miracle it could be surveyed at all, frankly. The last time we did, which had to do with a question by a logger as to whether a particular $20,000 walnut tree was on my side of the property line or the neighbors', or actually stradling it, the property "moved" about 8".

It was still their tree ;-) Pity - it was a beautiful tree, fully 40% on my side of the property, and I would not have cut it down just so the world could have another 3/4 of an acre of walnut veneer.