How were property lines known / created back in the old days when huge lots of land were owned / claimed?
In: 89
the same way they are today. Surveyors using expensive equipment. Shockingly the basic method by which the equipment works hasn’t changed in 500 ish years. You just start with 2 known spots, and an unknown spot. take the angles from both known spots to the unknown spot relative to north and a down, then use the distance between the 2 known spots and some trig to work out the location of the 3rd spot. Place a metal plate you can identify later, and pound it in at the 3rd spot. You now know 3 spots, repeat for any number of points you want to add.
Future surveyors can use your metal plate as a reference for their surveying (one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_marker).
All that has really changed is the precision of the angle and distance finders (using lasers and mirrors instead of telescopes and flames). And also the addition of GPS, which isnt used as much as you would think, but is used some.
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