eli5, Before GPS how did they make perfectly round roads?

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Regents park in London has an inner circle over a hundred years old, it is a perfect circle approximately 1km in circumstance with uneven terrain and lots of trees.

I am sure many other cities have similar large perfect circular roads.

Eli5 How did they ‘draw’ the road on this scale before building it?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Don’t exactly know how they did that particular park but surveying equipment (like theodolites) have been available for hundreds of years. Before that, you could use ropes of known lengths to measure relatively short distances precisely. What is needed are distance and angle measures.

On top of that humans have understood geometry for two thousand years (at least). And once you know geometry and trigonometry, constructing shapes using angle and distance measures aren’t too complicated.

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