It’s crazy to see how much has remained the same, even if so many new things were added. Looks like pretty much all the buildings that existed in 1777 still exist today.
Even crazier to think that at the time the original map was made, pretty much all cities in the US didn’t even exist yet.
The Measure Of All Things is a book about the effort to measure the circumference of the earth to establish the length of the metre, about twenty years after these maps were made. The book goes into a bit of the technology used to reduce errors.
But on further reading, it looks like there was an advance in theodolite design between when these maps were published and the survey for the metre. Wikipedia provides a good rabbit hole.
Even crazier to think that at the time the original map was made, pretty much all cities in the US didn’t even exist yet.