Whenever a road is built or worked on, a worker is looking through one of those telescopes on a tripod. I assume they are surveying or measuring straightness. please?
In: Technology
They’re surveying. The “telescope on a tripod” is probably a level.
A level is used to measure elevation. You look through it at a rod, and the height your eyes hit the rod at tells you how much higher or lower the ground at the rod is, compared to where you are standing.
Levels are pretty old school, but they still see a lot of use because they’re cheap and easy to use. Modern surveyors use a device called a total station, which looks like a big camera on a tripod. It’s operated remotely by a surveyor with a reflector on a stick. The device rotates to line up with the reflector, and then sends out a signal. It can figure out the distance between itself and the reflector, as well as the elevation difference. And it automatically updates a database in a computer with that data.
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