Measuring geodetic baselines in Spain during the 1850s

Abstract

The Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and the Liberal State gradually settled in Western Europe during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. This process began in England and France with the Industrial and the French Revolutions. It then spread across the continent in times of Napoleon. Its rate of growth slowed with the Congress of Vienna in 1815. From1848onwards, it reached anewpeakwith the popular revolutions and their effects, which swept through Europe giving birth to new states such as Germany and Italy, based on a new conception of economic, social and political structures. This period meant in Spain, as in the rest of Western Europe, this break-up of the economic, social and political frame of the Ancient Régime and the leap to the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and the Liberal State. These profound transformations aimed to provide the new productive forces with modern technical means that could help exploiting the raw materials and developing the country. New official institutions were to be settled in order to help scrutinising and representing Spain. In other words, new public bodies had to be founded for gathering precise statistical data, establishing a new cadastre to collect taxes more efficiently, creating a modern topographic map based on a national geodetic grid, drawing thematic maps to reveal the raw materials in the country, etc. Regarding cartography, the evolution in representing the Iberian Peninsula underwent only slight variations and improvements from the end of the Middle Ages until approximately 1750. There was a strong scientific progress during the second half of the eighteenth century when drawing up an accurate National Topographic Map became a relevant matter of concern (see Camarero, 2006). Nevertheless, these projects from the mid-eighteenth century did not come to fruition and mapping projects fell into a ‘morass’ during the first half of the nineteenth century (Paladini, 1991). Thus, the most precise maps available in Spain by 1850 dated from the second half of the eighteenth century and looked similar to those from 1600 (Hernando, 2005). These maps were useful in terms of geographic information. However, they did not provide any geometric accuracy as they had not been drawn upon precise geodetic and topographical measurements. Therefore, these maps were clearly insufficient for the needs of the industrial era. Several Commissions were set up in the 1850s with the aim of observing and calculating the geodetic and levelling grids, drawing up the National Topographic Map and drawing up the Spanish Cadastre. This institutional and technical decanting process