It was a good design that was easy to manufacture. It’s predecessor, the M1938 lensatic compass, was developed and adopted just as WWII opened. The M1950 compass is a design born of war. It is the US Army’s Model 1950 lensatic compass. It is tried and true and is one of my favorite compass designs. It is perhaps the most tested compass design in history, with documented use in jungle, desert, woodland and arctic environments around the world. I’m going to kick off our formal evaluation of compass accuracy with the a design that has been in continuous use for over 60 years and has seen use by millions of individuals. If I remember correctly he entered the Army in the late 60’s, so it is entirely possible for young Specialist Price to have appeared in this film: Norm had been a Cartographic Technician warrant officer who recently converted to the new Terrain Analysis Technican field (MOS 215D) just before I met him. I first met Norm at Fort Lewis in in 1987. Now, part II is interesting because I swear the soldier who is shown working at 5:40 is an old friend, Norm Price. This movie (broken into three parts by YouTube) was filmed mostly at the old Defense Mapping School at Fort Belvior, VA: Part I: But for now let’s celebrate the old ways, when men were men, theodolites didn’t have any electronic components and cartographers wore ties while they worked at their light tables. Of course today it is all different digital satellite imagery, GPS, LiDAR and desktop computers have fundamentally changed the mapping profession. Sure, there were a few improvements here and there – better materials, more accurate surveying equipment and better aerial photography cameras – but the basic steps remained pretty much unchanged. In fact, not a whole lot if the equipment changed, either. The steps in this movie really didn’t change for about 60 years, from the late 1920s to around 1990 or so. I was wandering through YouTube at work today (shhhhh…) and stumbled on this neat old Army training film that describes the steps required to make a paper topographic map, circa 1973.
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