How British Cartographers Made Maps in 1961

Vintage British Pathé footage from 1961 goes inside a cartographer‘s studio to find out how road maps were made during a time when England’s roads were being paved cross-country, and new technology was making onerous tasks much easier to accomplish.

New big motor roads are under construction the bulldozers making deep and dirty marks across the map… Four men measured a six mile baseline in two days, a job that took 42 pre-war surveyors nearly a month to do with the old tripods and steel tapes. It used to take two men a whole year to do the map making mathematics that these adding machines and electronic computers can do in an afternoon….

via Nag on the Lake