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Skip to main content. Surveyor's Transit. This lithograph, one of perhaps thirty, was recovered from the Green St. By that time c. The transit in the museum collection was purchased from a Marblehead, MA, estate in At the time of the Liberty Tool Co. The lithographs were hidden away on a high shelf in one of the dusty abandoned offices. After an especially distinguished history, the company finally went out of business in Beyond the office is a small storage room with low doorways, shelves, cubby-holes, trays, and drawers of instrument parts.
Other dark alcoves jut off this room and under the stairs, and other cabinets and parts storage can be seen within. On a corner shelf in a rickety box is an instrument for testing level bubbles. Transits and surveying instrument telescopes, all dusty, are stowed around. Off this room is another very small room, barely large enough for one man to work.
A shelf is built along one wall on which stands an ancient looking instrument with two electrified brass light cylinders on each side and a pivoted magnifying tube in the center rear and a circular clamp in the center. There is a device at the right for holding horizontal over the central clamp a pair of large tweezers, the ends of which are coated with tallow.
Around the shelf and on other shelves packed into the corners of the room are old chewing and pipe tobacco cardboard boxes of the sort that haven't been seen for forty years. The boxes hold eye piece rings to be worked on at the instrument mentioned above. In a covered wooden box below the shelf are racks of wood 2 inches wide by 12 inches long, with a short wooden peg in the center of each short end to allow the racks to be twisted between the fingers of two hands.
On these, neatly stacked, with wood strips dividing them like a lumber pile, are spider webs used for the cross hairs applied to the eye piece rings. The next morning the spiders are put on the racks which are then twisted as the spider tends to drop to the floor and thus the webs are wound up on the rack. Good spiders will provide three or four reels each. The web thickness varies from reel to reel, but is fairly uniform on any one reel.
The eye piece rings are carefully scored to show where the cross hairs made from the webs are to be placed. One is carefully aligned on the central circular clamp and the tallow on the tweezers ends is softened.
The tweezers are then touched to opposite sides of the rack, which lifts off a length of cobweb. The tweezers are then secured in the right hand clamp and lowered into the correct position so that the web exactly aligns with a set of score marks on the eye piece rings.
A few drops of lacquer applied with a toothpick to the ends bonds the web to the metallic part. The web is stronger and more elastic than steel wire of the same diameter.
Behind these two rooms is a long, narrow workshop with four or five parallel tiers of work benches and machining equipment, principally lathes, all powered by a 19th-century system of overhead spindles, pulleys, and leather belts, all humming and thumping together.
Only three or four men are at work in this room. One works on aligning two parts of a transit vernier, demonstrating the charcoaling of the vernier scale with a small wooden reverse clamp to hold the divided vernier scale solidly. First, oil is applied to the scale, then a stick of charcoal is rubbed over, and excess oil and charcoal wiped away with a rag.
Other men are turning exact pieces, all individually fitted, although the pieces are received rough from the foundry and successively refined and polished in this room.
Trays of parts on the benches and under the benches are everywhere. Some pieces have just been received from the basement where black enamel has been baked onto the surface of various pieces.
Upstairs there is a room where optical lenses are ground. There are cakes of grinding rouge, grinding forms, grinding wheels, and slugs of uncut flint glass. Next, also upstairs, is a repair alcove where instruments sent in for fixing are tended to. On a table is an iron oven where various work is performed in the old days sometimes lunches were cooked there. There are also two vats of acid to eat off enamel on instruments to be refinished and a coffee pot over a Bunsen burner.
More rows of lathes and other instruments, more belts and spindles, more trays of parts and racks of unassembled instruments are found here. In the basement is a small, locked, double room. It's concrete and musty, containing four dividing engines of various sizes and capabilities, the largest of which is probably in the vicinity of four feet in diameter. These were not in operation while I was there. The rest of the basement is a paint shop and a woodworking shop where instrument boxes are produced.
One of the most important and revolutionary inventions of the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the American Transiting Theodolite. It is more commonly known as a transit. Theodolites were invented and used in Europe and England for some time but it was not until approximately that an instrument with a transiting telescope and a compass located in the center of the device appeared and was produced in significant numbers. These changes along with the double horizontal verniers and a vertical vernier made the instrument uniquely American in concept and design.
The instruments reigned supreme in the position as the most versatile and precise surveying and engineering instruments for over one hundred years. One man's instrument, first built in was produced largely unchanged for over seventy years and it was one of the best. George Buff the inventor of this instrument and Christian Louis Berger, who would for some time be his business partner, were two of the premier instrument makers of the time and they left an indelible mark on the history of instrument making and the history of the United States.
They were by no means the only people to produce instruments but they were unusual in that they both emigrated from Germany to the United States and they both ended up living in Boston, Mass.
Additionally they both had factories producing transits in the same city at the same time. Their story is inseparable from that of the transit itself. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the transit to the development of the United States. All of the large engineering projects were laid out and leveled and in fact the lands the creations were built on were surveyed with these instruments. Bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, railroads, runways and even the building the space shuttle was built in was laid out with the use of a transit.
Seldom in history has a single device had such enormous impact on a nation. We hope you found the information you were looking for and that it has been beneficial. Full documentation and certification is provided. Our Gallery, Art of the Print, offers a wide selection of international fine art dating from the early Renaissance to the contemporary art period.
More commonly called the Transit, it was first built by George Louis Buff shortly after the end of the Civil War. Theodolites had been in use in Europe for many years but George Buff significantly improved the accuracy of the instrument by adding a transiting telescope, a central compass, double horizontal verniers and a vertical vernier.
The end result was the creation of the world's most precise surveying and engineering instrument which remained unchallenged until the advent of digital technology in the 's. Williams Company, Richmond, U. Williams, Richmond, Virginia U. Leyendecker, Lithographed by A. Direction of J. Saunders Gordon, - American Tour for Mme. Eugenia Mantelli Original Watercolor c. Our collection consists of original paintings, watercolors, drawings, and original prints, such as etchings, engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, silk-screens, aquatints, mezzotints, linocuts, monoprints, and other mediums of original art.
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