 In Vietnam, a farmer for the first time in his life holds a title to his own parcel of land. His deed is a map. In Panama, ships must often line up waiting their turn to pass through the canal. Consideration is now being given to digging a second route. Map makers will help decide where and how. Elsewhere in Latin America, students from many countries learn one of the basic essentials for the development of their region, the intricate science of making maps. And on the way to the moon, the astronauts carry maps of the lunar surface to help them find the predetermined safe landing spot. Throughout the world and even beyond, these and thousands of others are benefiting from the work of the world's leading map maker, the United States Army. Since the beginning of time, man looked around and wondered, what lies beyond the next hill? What lies beyond the horizon? And as he trod the earth, he sought to mark his way. To name places and things, to measure distances, to improve his way of life, to explore new lands, to reach out farther and farther. As his world expanded, his ways of making maps improved. Today, modern topographic map making originates here at Topocom, the Army's topographic command just outside Washington, D.C., the world's largest mapping agency. Their work benefits the lives of thousands of people in many lands. Maps are needed as a basis for nearly everything man calls progress. They are guides to the building of roads, shopping centers, homes, even whole towns. They help us locate and exploit our natural resources, and they define the boundaries of man's most cherished possession, land. The Army Topographic Command has the stupendous job of preparing topographic maps for our Defense Department, from collecting the data to placing the finished product into the hand of the users. Along the way, Topocom helps with the mapping of underdeveloped countries, enabling them to provide better lives for their people. The business of making a map begins with a set of aerial photographs, which could be supplied by many sources to include the Navy and Air Force. Today's cameras are so good that the photos show amazingly fine detail, even though the aircraft may fly at 35,000 feet. With only a small portion of the world's surface adequately mapped, aerial photography is adding to our knowledge of the Earth's land surface. But curiously, one aspect of map making has changed only slightly with the passing years. The surveyor in the field still holds the key to modern map making. When time and terrain permit, he still must trudge a foot to established known points on the ground that can be identified in the aerial photos. This is work for men who aren't afraid to face nature. Experienced mountain climbers prepared to scale menacing cliffs are sometimes needed for specialized missions. At the shore, men record tidal changes and the temperature of the sea. Across forbidding deserts, sun and sand put a strain on men as well as equipment. Even in the cities, there are hazards of a sort. Working amid the chatter of curious bystanders. But there's more to do on the ground than just survey. Teams of field classifiers cover on foot endless miles to native villages and across small islands. Their job is to find out the names of places and things by asking what the natives call them and figuring out how to spell it in English. Army topographers have had to familiarize themselves with some of the world's rare languages for this strange assignment. Computer, we're at approximately four strips. Very good. The material gathered in the field eventually arrives at Topocom. The first job is to correct and arrange the aerial photos and it takes a set of photos like this to make up a single map. Each of these photos has to be corrected for distortions caused by attitude of the aircraft, camera angle, lens error, and so forth. From the work of the field surveyors, elevations above sea level are known and so is the true scale of distances. The process begins on a device as complicated as its name. The stereoplanograph. Inside, the operator has placed a pair of the aerial photos. They give a three-dimensional picture of the terrain. Painstakingly, he locates the control points that will help tie together the many photos for the map. The results recorded on a plotting sheet show how the individual photos will overlap. When the position for each photo has been determined, the map is ready to be drawn. Each bit of information on the aerial photographs will be transferred to the plotting sheet in its correct location. Once again, two aerial photos taken at different angles form a three-dimensional image of the terrain. The cartographer will view one photo through the lens of a plane. Through the lens of a red eyeglass, the other through a blue so that he is able to see the rise and fall of the terrain very much in the way our grandfathers viewed scenes in a stereopticon. While photographs provide the look of reality, the cartographer's skill must translate these bits and pieces of photographic detail into understandable map form. The cartographer is the artist of map making. Although many steps have been taken over by machines and computers, this one remains a painstaking hand process. Now the map begins to take form. We can see low fertile marshlands, high sharp cliffs, roadways and railways, urban areas and remote villages. What had been a set of aerial photographs is now well on its way to becoming a map. Okay, let's take a look at it, Jim. Oh, that looks fine. Yeah, that's fine, Jim. What would a map be without color? Well, it would be a lot harder to read. An etching artist separates the various colors for printing. For example, everything that is to come out brown, he draws on one sheet of acetate. Each of the other colors goes on a separate sheet. He must be able to select from the conglomeration of lines precisely the ones that represent the map detail he is etching. It's a job that demands skill and exhausting precision. When the finished overlays are placed one on top of the other, they combine to form a complete map. In some mapping jobs, Topacom calls into play a giant of a camera, one of the world's largest. You can't help but feel like a little fusion next to this gulliver size device. Each reproduction negative of the map image is positioned on a sensitized metal press plate and exposed to create an image on this plate. The developed plates are ready for the presses, one plate for each color of the completed map. The huge presses at Topacom turn out millions of maps every year. Since the beginning of the Asian conflict, some 300 million maps have been printed for that area alone. Within minutes, the completed maps are rolling out at the rate of 10,000 map sheets an hour. The Army pioneered development of the plastic relief map that has quite literally brought a new dimension to maps. An operator who combines his mapping knowledge with a precision cutting instrument begins the job. As he traces from a contour map to cut the first stepped landform replica from a laminated plastic block, it doesn't look much like the Earth's surface yet, but that'll be taken care of on a plaster cast. The plaster cast is carved and shaped into a precise miniature replica of the terrain. Here in the final step, a flat plastic map is formed into a three-dimensional map. It's done in seconds by employing heat and vacuum. The map comes out endowed with hills and valleys in all the right places. Today the computer has entered the scene helping to turn out plastic relief maps in a fraction of the time it took to produce bimanual methods. The computer drives a milling machine to shape the Earth's surface with a speed and precision that man can never rival. By hand, this is up to a 10-week job. The computer-controlled mill does it in a single working day. But that use of the computer in mapping is old hat already compared to the technique called numerical mapping. As the contours of the map are painstakingly traced, every movement of the stylus is translated into electronic pulses. These pulses are recorded on magnetic tape. What results is a map in modern form stored as invisible bits of data on computer tape. The stored information can be drawn out in conventional form at will. Topocom already has several hundred maps recorded on tape. Numerical mapping is the coming thing. It's constantly being put to new uses and in time may become the standard technique for solving many complex design problems for civilian and military uses. No one knows better than the combat soldier what it means to have an accurate map of unknown terrain. Map making must keep pace with the advancing science of war. The man in combat needs highly detailed information to find his way to plan artillery fire and plan movements of supply units. Men of the Army engineers need the same information as construction crews at home. Elevation and slope, distances, and water level. Communications men must determine the best location for relay towers to arch their signals from hill to hill. Modern, accurate maps mark their way. But beyond the battlefront, another kind of drama is taking place, touchingly human. Land is food. Land is life in Anjong Province, Vietnam. One bold step of the Vietnamese government is their experimental land reform program, giving ownership of small parcels of farmland to the peasants. Now for the first time in his life, a Vietnamese holds a title to his own farm, a title which has an extremely personalized meaning to him for it contains a map of his own land supplied by courtesy of the United States in cooperation with land reform agencies of the Republic of Vietnam. Maps are helping change the face of the earth. In Central America, a new route may be dug to relieve the congestion of ships passing through the Panama Canal locks. Computers will assist in evaluating the terrain to help seek out the shortest and best route and help plan where to spot the explosives that may be used to dig the new ditch. Like all developing regions, Latin America desperately needs maps as a first step on the road to progress. The U.S. Army lends a hand by conducting a school for cartographers. Students come from throughout Latin America. The object is to create a self-sufficient mapping organization in each country. Mapping 8 million square miles of territory is a big job in any language. Accurate maps will help to bring a brighter, richer future for the people of Central and South America. And these students are just a small part of the thousands of people the world over who benefit from the talents and technology of the U.S. Army's topographic command. Topographic units overseas are collecting data and producing maps in Korea, Hawaii, Germany, and Vietnam in some of the most rugged terrain in the world. Always in the forefront of advances in their field, Army mappers began using space science several years ago with the launching of a small rocket. It put into orbit the Secor satellite, which has become a major advance in accurate mapping. The signals transmitted to Earth from the satellite seek out the specific location of an unknown point by geometrically linking three established ground locations. Sophisticated ground stations track the precise path of the satellite. The Secor belt connects islands 4,000 miles apart and is a part of a worldwide system telling us for the first time the true size and shape of the Earth. Besides correcting navigational errors, it ties the world together for all time to come as a single mapping unit. American astronauts on their way to the moon carry maps of the lunar surface with incredibly fine detail. In this special Topocom project for NASA, Army scientists are mapping the moon. The source material is, as always, aerial photography. But these pictures taken by the Ranger, Orbiter, and Surveyor spacecraft were transmitted back to Earth by radio in small bits and pieces. Assembled, the fragments become a large, highly refined mosaic. First proof of the map maker's success in depicting the lunar surface came on the Apollo 8 mission, that monumental voyage around the moon and home again. On their first lunar orbit, the astronauts began radioing back to Earth about the landmarks they were passing, the crater's messier and pickering, the Pyrenees Mountains, the seas of fertility and tranquility, landmarks they were able to identify from the detailed lunar maps they carried on board. On Earth, those prosaic radio messages brought elation to every Army map maker who had worked for so long to create those unique, unprecedented maps. This looks like the moon, but it's just a model at the manned spacecraft center in Houston. Here, the astronauts practiced the ticklish job of maneuvering to the selected landing spot and making a gentle touchdown. A model is a scale replica of the actual area chosen for the landing. And it was constructed from maps like those prepared by the Army. In these drills, the astronauts must identify the correct spot. Then firing brief blasts from their steering and deceleration jets, they move into position and gently lower themselves onto the surface. The astronauts themselves gave silent testimony to the realism of this practice by their tense alertness, as if they were in fact landing on the moon. We beat down to an half, picking up some dust, four forward, four forward, drifting to the right. Can stop, A.P.A. at a deep end. Out of control, both auto, deep end engine command override off, engine arm off, 413 is in. Listen, tanguality base here. The eagle has landed at the foot of the ladder. The map makers' efforts were truly justified when American astronauts became the first men in history to walk on the moon. With a relatively level plane created with a fairly large number of craters of the 5 to 50 foot variety inside my bare man from the planet Earth, first step foot upon the moon. July 1969, he came in peace for all mankind, president of the United States. The research and development that has made the Army an international leader in mapping goes on at the engineer topographic laboratories, a few miles outside the nation's capital. Army scientists are laying foundations for the future, finding ways to improve the accuracy and value of maps and the speed at which they can be produced. They are finding out how the fantastic light of the laser can ease the burden of the field surveyor. The laser's thin, powerful beam can measure up to 50 miles. Imagine two hills some distance apart. A ground surveyor must make five or ten measurements to find out the exact distance. With a laser, he can do it in a single measurement in moments, saving strenuous days of hacking through jungles or climbing mountains. This is a look into the future. It's a special kind of map that represents a new generation. Called an ortho-photomap, it's a product of this complex of modern electronic wizardry. Almost any kind of stereophotography can be used to make an ortho-photomap. When run through the computer, distortions of the original photograph are removed so that every detail on the ground looks as though it were photographed straight down, vertically. The machine-made ortho-photomap serves a specialized use and represents a big step toward the ultimate goal of automated map making. Computers can't really think, but army scientists are working with a test model of one that can see. A beam of light scans a transparent photograph, and the various tones and shadings of the image are translated into computer language. The operator can ask the computer to select, automatically, woods or lakes, oil depots, railroads or orchards. In minutes, the computer has read the photograph and found out what it was sent to look for. Today, still in its early stages, this research will make possible entirely new ways of using maps. Even the work of the field surveyor may partially be taken over by automated electronic equipment as a result of efforts by army scientists to produce point positions from aerial photography. In present-day map production, a draftsman manually draws the symbolized data which appear on the final map. This is a time-consuming and tedious process. The engineer topographic laboratories are developing equipment and techniques to digitize the map data. These equipments, in combination with a digital computer and a plotter, are being used to automate the drawing of the map data. It is estimated that this research and development will speed up the drafting operation by 50%. Since the beginning of man's history, the making of a map has been a key factor in the growth and progress of civilization. Today, mapmaking continues to play a major role in both military and civilian uses, and the Army Topographic Command maintains its position as an international leader in mapping a better tomorrow.