Edwin Danson's Drawing the Line, How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in US History provides a wealth of informaiton on the development of 18th century surveying equipment. A bit too much for me.

The jacket bills this book as the first popular history of the drawing of the Mason/Dixon line. To me, popular history is far more asseccable than the opening chapters of this book. Mr. Danson's work would be very interesting to geographers and surveyor's, but it left me struggling with too much detail about Mason and Dixon's gear and longing for more details on thier lives and personalities.

Danson does provide us details on the emense challange that Mason and Dixon faced. There was much more to drawing their famous line picking a starting point and running surveyor's chains in a straight line between Maryland and Pennslyvania.

This book provides readers with tantilizing hints about Mason and Dixon that lead one to believe they would be very interesting subjects for a biography, but we get no more about them than one gets from listening to Mark Knofpler's song "Sailing to Philadelphia". Perhaps if Danson had reversed his priorities and provided readers with more about Mason and Dixon and less about their equipment I would have rated this book higher.

Still, if you have an interest in map making or surveying or the Mason/Dixon line, Danson's book will inform you, it just doesn't entertain.

Who hasn't heard of Mason and Dixon but Drawing the Line makes them seem like old friends. This is one of those books you occasionally find that gives you 'two for the price of one'.
The book begins with the founding of Maryland and Pennsylvania and background to the quarrels between the colonies - interesting things I never knew about America and Britain. Danson then tells about contemporary astronomy science and surveying, which is equally interesting. There are no maths or complex equations (sorry Dreckman and Lorenzi but I couldn't find any and I read the whole book) but there is an appendix with technical explanations for those who like that sort of thing but I skipped it.
The story is how Mason and Dixon are recruited by the British Royal Society to go to South Africa to record the transit of Venus and measure the distance to the sun and on the way they are ambushed by a French warship. The excellence of their work in Africa makes them the ideal men to survey the Maryland / Pennsylvania border. Danson then follows the adventures of Mason and Dixon as they survey the borderlines and explore America. The period of their work coincides with the independence movement and the narrative is full of contemporary comment, issues and observation. They also measure a 'degree of latitude' to discover the size of the earth. The book finishes with Mason and Dixon's twilite years and a bitter-sweet ending.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the excitement mixing science with history makes. It is finely pitched enough to make you think a little but you don't need to be an astrophysicist to understand or enjoy it. Excellent fun.

Most people have probably heard of the Mason-Dixon line, though they may not be aware of where or exactly what it is. I grew up less than three miles from the famous line that separates Maryland from Pennsylvania, and was aware that there were stone monuments spaced every mile along the boarder - but I had no idea of the origins of this line. Danson weaves the historical backdrop that necessitated the survey and follows Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two British astronomers, as they traveled to the colonies with their telescopes, quadrants, and mathematical expertise. A surveying job such as this required exquisite accuracy in the determination of latitude and longitude - a job for skilled astronomers in their day.

For the more technically inclined, appendices are provided that go deeper into the methods surveyors use to shoot the lines. Given the amount of astronomy involved in such a surveying job, I wish the author would have provided more detail about the instruments Dixon and Mason used to accomplish their task. I'm sure it was not Danson's intention to cover this sort of technical instrumentation in detail, but in my (biased) opinion, it would have enhanced the story. Still an excellent book and one any person interested in the history of science should read.