Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Speaker 1: Chuck and there's Jerry. You can hear air conditioning in
Speaker 1: the background, and this is short stuff. I got this
Speaker 1: idea just a couple of days ago. Emily and I
Speaker 1: were watching Jeopardy, as we don't do every night, but
Speaker 1: we try to make it that appointment viewing. We have
Speaker 1: a good time watching that show together. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the time we were on Jeopardy? I
Speaker 1: know how about that? Uh, it's funny because my daughter
Speaker 1: will walk through the room occasionally be like you were
Speaker 1: on that shows. Um. So it was a question a
Speaker 1: couple of nights ago or I guess an answer. A
Speaker 1: clue is what they call them. And it said something
Speaker 1: about these two gentlemen, and I can't remember exactly how
Speaker 1: it was worded, um, but something about like surveying, and
Speaker 1: I was like Lewis and Clark, and it was Mason
Speaker 1: and Dixon. And being from the South, you always hear
Speaker 1: about the Mason Dixon line are not always, but it's
Speaker 1: a enough term to where I was like, wait a minute.
Speaker 1: I was like, Mason and Dixon were people, and I
Speaker 1: never really thought about it. Of course, they were, but
Speaker 1: I knew nothing about this at all. So this popped up.
Speaker 1: The House of Works had a pretty actually really good
Speaker 1: article on it. So, um, here we go and away
Speaker 1: we go. Because I thought Mason and Dixon were probably
Speaker 1: politicians of some sort, I had no idea they were
Speaker 1: the surveyors. You've got to be a pretty amazing surveyor
Speaker 1: for somebody to name your survey after you, especially when
Speaker 1: it's the one that's as important as the Mason Dixon line,
Speaker 1: because as we'll see, it's the line that divided the
Speaker 1: north and the south. But even before that, decades before that,
Speaker 1: it was a really important line that settled the decades
Speaker 1: long boundary dispute between William Penn and the Pennsylvania Colony
Speaker 1: and um Lord Baltimore Charles Calvert of the Maryland Colony
Speaker 1: to the south. And those two were really going at it.
Speaker 1: And the reason they were going at it was because
Speaker 1: Penn was given the land down to the parallel fortieth
Speaker 1: degree latitude north latitude, and Calvert, Lord Calvert was given
Speaker 1: the land from I think like the Potomac up to parallel.
Speaker 1: The problem is the earliest maps that map Parallel got
Speaker 1: it kind of wrong, and Philadelphia by these early maps,
Speaker 1: was in Maryland, about five miles within the Maryland border,
Speaker 1: and William Penn said, that just can't stand. We need Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: It's really important. Yeah, like everyone wanted Philadelphia. One day,
Speaker 1: those great people will throw batteries at Santa Claus. I
Speaker 1: forgot about. We need to claim this wonderful city. Don't
Speaker 1: make this show it's always sunny in Philadelphia. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be pretty great and last a thousand years. Also, at
Speaker 1: Stake was about four thousand square miles, so it was
Speaker 1: a lot of land. And this was a dispute for decades,
Speaker 1: and the people of these two areas started to kind
Speaker 1: to worry that things were getting so heated that they
Speaker 1: would be like double text on their property, because both
Speaker 1: places would claim that they're in their part of the world.
Speaker 1: And so finally in seventeen sixty three, the King of
Speaker 1: England said, all right, I'm gonna get in here. We're
Speaker 1: gonna commission this survey. I got a couple of crack
Speaker 1: uh surveyors. Once an astronomer named Charles Mason. One is
Speaker 1: a surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon. There from England. They've got
Speaker 1: all this fancy, fancy modern equipment that they're gonna bring along.
Speaker 1: They're gonna need a ton of booze and a lot
Speaker 1: of people, and it's gonna take years, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: finally settle this. Yeah. They spent fifty eight months from
Speaker 1: what I can tell, basically straight through living in tents
Speaker 1: surveying a two hundred and thirty three mile or three
Speaker 1: seventy four kilometer stretch, and they settled that boundary dispute.
Speaker 1: And did they ever because even still today, surveyors, modern
Speaker 1: surveyors who used geosynchron satellites to do their surveying, are
Speaker 1: in awe of how accurate Mason and Dixon's survey line
Speaker 1: and their their boundary line work was. That it was
Speaker 1: just almost precisely dead on because they've gone back, modern
Speaker 1: surveyors have gone back and recalculated it, and they're like,
Speaker 1: it's basically exactly right. Yeah, And I think some of
Speaker 1: the techniques they use informed surveying that we still see today.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a pretty cool story. Um, so let's
Speaker 1: take a break. We'll talk a little bit about that
Speaker 1: booze and uh, how they accomplished this feat a little
Speaker 1: more right after this, it's they got drunk a lot, apparently,
Speaker 1: I guess, so I don't want to harp on it,
Speaker 1: but it is pretty funny. One of the footnotes in
Speaker 1: this article that you sent, Uh, where did that come from?
Speaker 1: It was good. I will tell you later on okay. Um,
Speaker 1: the supply list from seventeen sixty four, and it's just
Speaker 1: one of the years had twenty twenty gallons of whiskey,
Speaker 1: forty gallons of brandy, and eighty gallons of wine. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the end, they were paid about thirty five hundred
Speaker 1: pounds uh sixteen pounds and nine shillings, which would be
Speaker 1: about three hundred grand today or about sixty dollars per year.
Speaker 1: But they did a lot of hard work drawing this line.
Speaker 1: It was very meticulous. They had some Native Americans helping
Speaker 1: them as guide, some Iroquois people. Uh. They had about
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty people in their party, and they,
Speaker 1: like I said, they had sort of the state of
Speaker 1: the art equipment at the time, which, um, you know,
Speaker 1: I think informed later equipment, but it is pretty pretty
Speaker 1: cract stuff at the time. Yeah. There's one in particular
Speaker 1: called a zenith sector and it had a plumb line
Speaker 1: that ran vertically straight, vertically to the ground, and then
Speaker 1: it had a telescope that you could, you know, put
Speaker 1: to different degrees at different angles, and then you had
Speaker 1: to get on the ground and look up through the
Speaker 1: telescope to find the star you were looking for. And
Speaker 1: then you could measure the angle of the star um
Speaker 1: with the zenith of the sky, the highest point of
Speaker 1: the sky, and calculate an angle here on Earth. And
Speaker 1: that's the kind of stuff that they were doing again
Speaker 1: over fifty eight months. And one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: the survey was so advanced for its time is that
Speaker 1: it was the first geodetic survey carried out at least
Speaker 1: in North America. And geodetic surveys are the ones that
Speaker 1: are so precise. They calculate the lumps and bumps and
Speaker 1: um irregular spheroid shape of the Earth into its calculations
Speaker 1: to make it that precise. That's why it was so precise.
Speaker 1: But again, these guys weren't using satellites and computers. They
Speaker 1: were using telescopes and plumb lines that they had to
Speaker 1: get on the ground to look up to find stars with,
Speaker 1: and their noodles to calculate their findings. I wonder if
Speaker 1: the the King of England's like, we really just needed
Speaker 1: you to walk left and drop some bird seed. Uh,
Speaker 1: So what happened along the way? They they didn't drop
Speaker 1: bird seed. This is kind of even more impressive. Is
Speaker 1: that reference to something dropping bird seed? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: the old stories of dropping bird seed to find your
Speaker 1: way back? But yeah, you never heard that? No I haven't.
Speaker 1: Is it like the joke is because like the birds
Speaker 1: would come eat the seed. I think it was probably
Speaker 1: from some fairy tale. Originally, I don't know. I totally
Speaker 1: ruined this. I really think we're going to edit this
Speaker 1: part out because I think I'm just going to leave
Speaker 1: it as is. It was so beautiful and hilarious, I
Speaker 1: think we should leave it. Um. So, what they did
Speaker 1: drop was limestone posts that they brought over from England
Speaker 1: every mile along the way, and I think it was
Speaker 1: like two hundred and thirty something miles UH in total,
Speaker 1: as well as an eighty three mile uh north south
Speaker 1: border between what was Pennsylvania or what is now Delaware
Speaker 1: what was then Pennsylvania in eastern Maryland. But they dropped
Speaker 1: these limestone posts along the way, and then every five
Speaker 1: miles dropped a crown stone, which is a very very heavy,
Speaker 1: like a five to seven hundred pounds stone that they
Speaker 1: carved a C on one side for calvert and a
Speaker 1: P on the other side for pen um. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: even had coat of arms and stuff like that until
Speaker 1: they got to the Appalachian Mountains and then they were like,
Speaker 1: we can't do these crown stones anymore. We can't carry
Speaker 1: these up over the mountain. And also it's hilarious they
Speaker 1: shipped these over from England, like, we're not sure if
Speaker 1: there's stone in America, so we're just gonna cover all
Speaker 1: those came from England because I know the posted I
Speaker 1: think the stones did as well. Okay, yeah, I'm pretty sure,
Speaker 1: which is hilarious but also really unnecessary. Sure, well, I
Speaker 1: didn't know what was over here. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: the Mason Dixon Line has been recalculated, much to the
Speaker 1: thrill of modern surveyors. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: first surveys of the Mason Dixon Line was carried out
Speaker 1: by the Mason Dixon Line Preservation Partnership, which is adorable
Speaker 1: because there's surveyors from Pennsylvania and surveyors from Maryland involved
Speaker 1: in that partnership, and they went around to do an
Speaker 1: inventory of all of those um milestones and crown stones
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, and they found a lot of them,
Speaker 1: which is really cool. I think they found all but ten. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they reckon just maybe flooding apparently. Uh. In the
Speaker 1: Civil War they would use them for target practice and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, or just the Civil War in general
Speaker 1: destroyed them. But all but ten is not too bad, No,
Speaker 1: it's not so. The Mason Dixon Line was established the
Speaker 1: boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and also Delaware and then
Speaker 1: what would become West Virginia, and that in and of
Speaker 1: itself was pretty great considering how acurate they were. The
Speaker 1: reason why it divides the North and the South had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with Mason and Dixon had to do
Speaker 1: with the fact that um Maryland was a slave state.
Speaker 1: It was the northernmost slave state, and in eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: the Missouri Compromise was passed that basically said the slave
Speaker 1: states are considered in the South, and all the South
Speaker 1: states are slave states, the North states are free states.
Speaker 1: And that's that. And because Maryland was a slave state,
Speaker 1: it was considered the South, and since it south of
Speaker 1: the missing Mason Dixon line, the Mason Dixon Line was
Speaker 1: used to distinguish the North and the South between eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty on, and that's kind of it. I'm sure Maryland
Speaker 1: today is like, oh, kind of not really though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think most of the South says the same thing too.
Speaker 1: I mean one of the biggest shocks I've ever gotten
Speaker 1: in my life, but a really dull life, was finding
Speaker 1: out that Maryland was technically in the South. I had
Speaker 1: no idea. Yeah, I mean, if you're from Georgia. I
Speaker 1: even remember growing up thinking Virginia was pushing it right. Um,
Speaker 1: But then I met Virginians and many I think maybe
Speaker 1: because they're fairly far north geographically on the East Coast,
Speaker 1: uh are sometimes very adamantly Southern. Yeah, they really love
Speaker 1: horses too. That's pretty southern. And then one other little tidbit,
Speaker 1: so from eighteen twenty to eighteen fifty, when the Fugitive
Speaker 1: Slave Act was passed, Um, if you were enslaved in
Speaker 1: Maryland and you can make it just across the border
Speaker 1: to Pennsylvania, you were free, amazing, and you would eventually
Speaker 1: become a Philadelphia Eagles fan. And boo Santa Claus. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they threw batteries at Santa Claus. They
Speaker 1: threw batteries at somebody. I feel like it was Santa Claus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that shows up in our Black Friday episode if
Speaker 1: you want to go listen to that one dedicated fans
Speaker 1: there in Philly. That's all I'll say. Right, And by
Speaker 1: the way, Chuck, that um the post that we were
Speaker 1: talking about, it's called the Survey of Mason and Dixon,
Speaker 1: Granddaddy of all titled disputes, and it's hosted on the
Speaker 1: Maryland Bar Association's website that m has be a dot org.
Speaker 1: So look it up. Fantastic and you'll be like, this
Speaker 1: is great. I love it, Okay, And I guess that's it, right, Chuck.
Speaker 1: I think that means you know what it means. Short
Speaker 1: stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production
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