HISTORY
by STEPHEN BOOTH
20 Years of GW Editor from 1995 to 2017, Stephen Booth looks back on an era that has seen technology change the nature of surveying, moving from the field to the desktop.
This exercise involved trawling back through 20 years of GWs and some Surveying Worlds from before September/October 2001, when the title changed name. It’s been a lengthy task. I was constantly distracted by the many interesting articles and especially juicy items in Undercurrents which I had to read again. MILLENNIUM’S EVE
The eve of the Millennium.
On the eve of the millennium, the edition of Surveying World for Nov/Dec 1999 set much of the scene for the coming decades. A striking cover image of Washington DC taken from the Ikonos-II satellite some 400 miles out in space heralded the coming growth of aerial imagery and remote sensing. The satellite was offering 1 metre resolution in B&W and 4 metres in colour. Today, there are micro satellites that capture full colour imagery, lidar, infrared, multispectral and SAR, all to within a metre or
so resolution. So, we were entering an era of innovation driven by technology and sometimes by events. In the meantime, what would today’s GW readers think of the choice made by readers 20 years ago of ‘Surveyor of the 20th Century’: head of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, Martin Hotine? Meanwhile, many were anxious and on tenterhooks about the threat of the millennium bug. However, the new millennium came without any of the expected bugs, largely due to the diligent attention of many IT specialists. Satellite positioning was moving ahead rapidly. In 1999, the EU decided to develop Europe’s own satellite navigation system, Galileo. GW reported on the plans following a major conference in Nice in November 2002. Meanwhile, the US and Russia had plans to upgrade their systems, the latter to complete their Glonass system. Of course, as Professor Paul Cross pointed out in an article for Showcase 2000 issue No 1, “the real drivers. . . do not come from surveyors and engineers. . . the real pressures. . . come largely from the transportation sector.” Cross-listed potential applications like meteorology, geophysical hazards, climate change, machine control, flood risk, farming, oceanography and timing for cell phones with GPS chips were soon appearing alongside other handheld devices. Important in the adoption of GPS was President Clinton’s order to remove selective availability from the satellites’ signals. The move
began decades of economic growth, marred only by the financial crash, the pandemic and the end of the trig pillar. It was the age of “Smart”: by 2017 (Jan/Feb), smartphones were being used for progress recording on construction sites. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous total station, which first arrived in the 1970s, had added GPS and photogrammetry via image capture to its onboard totality by the end of the millennium’s first decade. RICS: CONFERENCES AND A PROUD HISTORY In 1999, the RICS Land Survey Division, later renamed Geomatics, held a successful biennial conference and was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Keynote speaker Professor David Rhind, former DG of OSGB, told surveyors that societal change, technological development and the need for a radical review of education and training was necessary if we were to keep pace in the field of geomatics. The impact of the Web, globalisation and deskilling would also play a part. The conference also looked back at the history of the division through a brilliantly informative series of recollections put together by the then President, the late Professor Michael Cooper. Tales of hardship and derring-do in surveying and mapping around the world were recounted. But we were about to embark on an era when surveyors increasingly moved from behind the instrument to the detail pole and to the comfort of the office desk. As Iain Greenway observed, ‘there
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Winter 2020
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