Surveying in Action: See the 1930s Camp Tech Movie

In the days when civil engineers learned surveying, almost all male MIT Course 1 undergraduates spent a summer at Camp Tech in Maine to acquire essential skills with theodolites, transits, and plumb bobs.

From 1912 to 1953, generations of students bonded with classmates and teachers as they surveyed the woods and fields. (The few female students had to learn surveying in Cambridge.)

For many students, Camp Tech was their first time away from home. Thrown into a remote section of Maine, the vast majority of students loved the adventure, at least in retrospect. They treasured their weeks of intense study interspersed with boating on pristine Gardner Lake, gobbling up wild blueberries, and forging close friendships. Alumni at class reunions enjoy leafing through the Camp Tech yearbooks and can identify classmates after more than a half century.

Recently the MIT Museum digitized the only known movie of Camp Tech life, taken probably in the early 1930s with rather grainy images of students at work and play. You can watch online.

The movie begins with the student barracks, the main Bemis building perched high above the lake, and the morning bugle summons to breakfast.

Students loaded up their boats with equipment for a day of hard work in forest and field. With much hand signaling, they ran a transit line and drew topographical maps with the data. They toiled up stories of rough steps on Spruce Station for triangulation surveys from the top, and took depth measurements in the lake. Then the sextants for locating borders came out. After all that exertion, at night they quietly completed homework in front of a roaring fire in Bemis Hall.

Recognizing the importance of surveying in civil engineering history, the MIT Museum includes fine 19th century surveying tools in its MIT150 display of significant objects, people, and ideas.