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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Brad Washburn, Barbara Washburn. Timecode In: 00:00:05. Timecode out: 00:37:07. Notes: Mapping. Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Dual-Channel Mono. NPR/NGS Geographic Century Washburn DAT 10/27/98 Don Smith [DS] 00:20 Tell me how you¿d like to be identified. Brad Washburn [BW] 00:29 Well I¿m Dr. Bradford Washburn, the honorary director of Boston¿s Museum of Science, of which I was director for 41 years without a promotion. And I¿ve been out now since 1980 and I¿ve done a lot of the most exciting things in my life during those 18 years. It¿s been very thrilling. A lot of it with the National Geographic. Barbara Washburn [BBW] 1:13 I¿m Barbara Washburn and I¿ve been married to Brad for 57 years and I¿ve joined him on almost all of his expeditions. DS 1:23 Just talk briefly about map making at a very basic level. How do you go about making a map? BW 1:32 Well at least during my lifetime, there¿s been an enormous change in how you make a map. I mean in the old days, way back in the turn of the century, you worked with a plane table, you measured distances with a tape, you had instruments that measured angles without the precision of modern instruments. But then when we mapped the Grand Canyon for the Geographic in the 70s, this was the era when lasers came into the ballgame, and you didn¿t use tapes anymore. You had prisms on what spot and at the other end of the line you had a laser machine and it sent a beam and it bumped off the prisms and it came back to where it started. The machine automatically divides the result in two and gives you the distance down to a mm. There¿s no way you could have done work of that kind of accuracy before. 2:40 And now there¿s been another complete revolution. Now we¿re using global position satellites, GPS. So, in my lifetime there have been 2 major surveying revolutions. It¿s quite amazing today, we did work on Everest, I was in charge of the plans, a station on Mt. Everest now a few feet below the summit, the highest bedrock in the world. And we know the location of that spot now, on he surface of the earth, in a spherical cm. DS 3:16 How about airplanes? BW 3:17 Well, you can use airplanes if you have some ground control. You need some points on the ground and then you can take vertical photographs. Those points on the ground will give you a scale. But as far as details are concerned, stereo vertical aerial photographs are the way of getting great detail in maps on the ground. DS 3:47 And aerial photography was quite a revelation in, as you say, your lifetime. BW 3:52 yes, aerial photography blossomed largely because of warfare. Because in WWI they were beginning to take photographs straight down out of balloons, but they didn¿t really know how high they were or where they were, but they were good pictures. And then you begin to get pictures that are taken from aircraft. And when we mapped Mt. Everest, for example, for the NG, back in the early 1980s, we used a leer jet from 40,000 ft and got gorgeous stereo photographs from which that map in the NG was shown to 11 million people around the world. It was absolutely incredible. DS 4:44 Do we lose anything by using these modern technologies, for example aerial mapping? BW 4:53 The work that was done by ground expeditions gave those people a lot of fun as well as a lot of misery, and it¿s just a question whether you wish you were doing it the old fashioned way¿the mapping you did on the ground was not just positions and measurements, but then you had to draw and sketch things in between. So when you made the map you filled in the details by sketching and guessing. Now there¿s not guesswork at all. The great majority of this stuff is now done by machinery. DS 5:34 You once said that map makers need to steep themselves in a place, do you still think that? BW 5:... (Notes truncated)
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