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

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