Without a doubt, photogrammetry has been an essential part of the mapping and land development process. Without it, the completion of our national topographic quadrangles would have been impossible.
And I'm sure most of our surveyor readers have interacted with photogrammetrists as part of their job. In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing (ASPRS) we recently visited ASPRS headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland to chat with ASPRS Executive Director Jim Plasker.
ASPRS is located on a beautiful 39-acre campus, along with several other environmental resource organizations, including the Society of American Foresters. Also located on the property is a summer house that once belonged to Gilbert Grosvenor, the founder of the National Geographic Society. To this day, a great-great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell still lives adjacent to the property. ASPRS owns its own office condo and until the recent economic downturn, was involved in the potential sale of the entire property for use as the flagship campus of an international education organization. ASPRS likely would have stood to profit greatly had the property been sold.
During our meeting we sat at the same table the American Society of Photogrammetry's (ASP) founders sat at on July 29, 1934 when the organization was created. At the time, the International Society of Photogrammetry (ISP) was 25 years old, having been founded in 1910 by Eduard Dolezal of Austria. In the early 1990s, both organizations added remote sensing to their purview and are now known as ISPRS and ASPRS. ISPRS will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010. The ASP founders recognized the need for an American organization to set standards, investigate technology, and provide information exchange, and so, in 1935, the society's first annual meeting was held in the District of Columbia. Plasker commented that as the founders worked through the ISP statutes as a framework for the ASP Bylaws, the statutes had to be translated from French or German.
