What’s The tool no surveyor can be without?
The ubiquitous tool for a survey is called a theodolite, and it’s one job is to measure the horizontal and vertical angles between points.
Combine those angles with distances from a chain or tape measure, and you can triangulate the location of any point using trigonometry.
Modern theodolites, called total stations, cannot only measure angles, but distance as well, and they have on-board computers to do the calculations and record the data for later use. When you see a surveyor peering through a funny telescope, it’s probably a total station, and he or she is probably sighting a reflector to record the location of a point.
For long distances, these measurements have to be corrected for variations in earth’s gravity, refraction by the atmosphere, and yep, even the curvature of the earth. (Sorry Flat-Earthers!)
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