Straight Lines

“History moves in contradictory waves, not in straight lines”

As a contrast to the hyper-lacy borders of yesterday’s Mandelbrot set, today I’d like to look at a question posted on straightdope.com called How did the states establish long straight borders before GPS? Having western US roots I’m used to seeing long straight roads and neat lines for county and state borders. But as the article points out: 1. Straight lines are not always best and 2. The lines are not always as straight as they should be.

Point 1. A straight line is an easy border to write into law and land deeds; for example the 42nd parallel. But consider what happens when a winding river repeatedly crosses the straight border. The land “enclosed” by a river loop might be mostly NY but with one foot of PA on the inside edge. Imagine the complications in land registration and taxation. But defining a river as a border has drawbacks also; i.e. rivers move over time. Take a close look at the border of North Dakota and Minnesota - the Red River is incredibly loopy - on my GPS it's a fuzzy smudge - not a line.

Point 2. There are many reasons that straight borders are sometimes crooked.

A. Surveyors connect points with straight lines but the globe is curved. Find a globe and place a string on two points along the 45th parallel. Pull the string taunt. Notice how the string does NOT follow the 45th parallel.

B. Some surveyors forgot to correct for magnetic north because a compass does not point exactly true North. When surveyors defining the Virginia-North Carolina-Kentucky-Tennessee border working from the West and the East finally met, there was a 12 mile N/S error in their lines. Look at a map of Kentucky and look for the jag on the southern border about 70 miles from the western edge.

C. Sometimes the correct starting point of the border is poorly defined. The Missouri-Iowa border is defined by "the rapids of the River Des Moines." The Supreme Court later had to decide: which rapids?

D. Occasionally the surveying team is drunk. When drawing a 22-mile border between Quebec and Vermont, a fifth of the expenses went for booze. An international commission later acknowledged, that the border was "very far from a straight line."

Bottom Line

It’s funny how difficult some simple ideas can be. A straight line has a very simple definition – the shortest distance between two points. But straight lines on a globe and in gravity curved outer space are arcs. Another simple idea is “North” but finding true North – not so easy.
Keep this in mind next time you get angry when someone fails at a “simple” task. Perhaps the reality of executing the task is not as simple as you thought.