Introduction
Considering the de facto use of the European datum of 1950 (ED50) throughout the oil industry operating in Northern Europe and the North Sea, I thought it would be interesting to explore this datum’s history and how it came to be the first European continent-wide datum. During the research for this project I uncovered a fasinating story of military intelligence during the Second World War. But first we must set the scene and go back to...
European Geodesy at the Turn of the 20th Century
“The first-order triangulation of Europe [was completed] over the last 200 years” (Hough, 1948) |
Prior to World War Two (WW2), Europe was divided into a jumble of independent national and sub-national geodetic datums with their own centre point, triangulation networks and ellipsoids only sometimes connecting to their neighbour’s triangulation effort along the borders.
