Northern Visions: Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919-1928

Northern Visions

Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919–1928

In 1936, the Canadian Surveyor, journal of the Dominion Land Surveyors' Association, introduced a new cover illustration. Alongside a field surveyor, the new image depicted a floatplane rising from the surface of an isolated northern lake. The decision to identify surveying with bush planes reflected the central place that aviation occupied in Canadian surveying and the important contributions aircraft could make to mining through the practice of aerial surveying. As part of a wider growth of interest in the country's north, the Canadian mining industry had begun to pay closer attention to mineral deposits located in the heart of the Canadian Shield. Upon entering this region, the industry encountered an intricate geography of low, rolling, rocky hills, muskeg bogs, and innumerable lakes, rivers, and creeks. Encounters with the land would encourage members of the industry to look for alternate methods of obtaining information about their new environment as the difficulty of overland travel and the sheer immensity of the territory made existing methods of mapping and surveying inappropriate. Canadian mineral developers turned to aerial surveying as a means of overcoming these obstacles. Throughout the 1920s, Canadians adopted aerial surveying as a key element of mineral-development practice such that, by 1936, the Dominion Land Surveyors' Association viewed the aircraft as an iconic surveying technology. Aerial surveying, however, could not be applied successfully without the development of appropriate surveying practices and processing methods. These adaptations resulted in a set of processing techniques that reflected the Canadian context of the 1920s.

As early as 1919, mining industry insiders advocated the use of aerial-surveying techniques to identify and explore the Shield's potential resources.¹ However, there was a substantial delay between the industry's identification of the technique's usefulness and the actual commercial application of aerial surveying by the mining industry in the late 1920s. This delay of almost a decade occurred primarily because Canadian users needed to develop suitable methods for processing information gained through aerial surveying. The postwar economic collapse of the early 1920s was a complicating factor, as Canadian mining companies did not have sufficient resources to develop their own methods. Fortunately for them, government attitudes to science and technology, including aviation, encouraged certain departments, namely the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and the Department of the Interior, to devote resources and energy to developing techniques for collecting and processing aerial photographs and aerial surveys. Institutional structures such as interdepartmental committees further supported these developments. This interaction of politics, economics, technology, geography, and cultural attitudes influenced the Canadian adoption and adaptation of aerial surveying, eventually producing a novel method of transforming aerial photographs into information useful to Canadian mineral developers. The transparent perspective-grid method of transference that resulted would eventually became known as the "Canadian grid method."² The conditions behind its development encouraged an emphasis on efficiency, robustness, speed, and utility over rigorous accuracy in the country's and the industry's efforts to obtain greater control over, and greater wealth from, the Canadian North.

National Styles

This history of adoption and adaptation naturally raises questions about the notion of national styles of technology. The concern with practical application, collection of economically useful information, reliability, useable results, and speed above accuracy apparent in the selection and adaptation of aerial surveying conforms to other patterns in the history of Canadian science and technology.³ The replication of these patterns suggests that there is some legitimacy to the claim that Canada has a distinct national style of technology; that is, that Canadian technologies exhibit a set of shared characteristics. Of course, such a claim launches us into the ongoing debates over the utility and accuracy of the notion of national styles of technology.

While historians such as Thomas Hughes, Mary Jo Nye, and Jonathan Harwood have made convincing arguments for the important influence of national contexts, institutions, politics, economics, and culture...