This work is the result of many circumstances, not the least of which was my childhood and high school years on the north shore of Monterey Bay. It was my good fortune to spend much of these years on the beaches and in the mountains near Santa Cruz, California. My life revolved around the tides, the surf, and the weather. When the salmon were running I would go fishing out over "the canyon" with my uncle. When the surf was good, I would be at the various breaks around Soquel Point (Pleasure Point to the natives); and when the tide was low, I would be out clamming or seeking abalone. I learned to find most of the "critters" that lived on the rocky shores and offshore ledges in the vicinity of Pleasure Point. Rounding out this oceanic experience, my father was a master mariner and for many years a captain for American President Lines. I would trace the progress of his various cruises in my atlas and wonder about the seas that he passed over.
 

In spite of this background I chose to break with the sea and go to a mining school. I graduated in the late 1960's, spent a short spell in the Army, and then entered the Corps of the Environmental Sciences Service Administration (ESSA Corps) which was the descendant of the commissioned service of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. My first assignment was to the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas on the ESSA Ship SURVEYOR. There was no getting away from the sea. In 1970 ESSA Corps became NOAA Corps with the formation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After thirteen years of various assignments including hydrography on the East Coast and Florida Gulf Coast, geodetic surveying in the western United States, a stint at the National Geophysical Data Center, and a little graduate education, I was made liaison to the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
 

It was at Scripps that my interest in the history of my organization was kindled. I will always treasure being able to sail with and share discussions with many of the leaders of modern oceanography. In particular Dr. Fred Spiess and Dr. George Shor made my stay at Scripps quite enjoyable. Their command of the history of their institution and of its place in the history of science and oceanography impressed upon me my ignorance of my own organization. Because of their inspiration, I began this seemingly interminable project of unraveling the history of NOAA Corps and its ancestor agencies.
 

Prior to beginning this quest, I was vaguely aware that the Coast Survey and its descendant organizations charted the marine waterways of much of the North American continent; but it came as a series of surprises to discover that my organization had followed the flag into new territories such as Alaska and the Philippines to conduct charting and geodetic surveys, served in the major wars of the United States as a sort of technical "fifth column," built an invisible network of geodetic survey points throughout the United States that is one of the great engineering marvels of the world, and pioneered the geophysical sciences in the United States and much of the Western Hemisphere. I also discovered that the work of my organization helped guide 100's of billions of tons of cargo into and out of our ports, helped establish the commercial flight-paths of the modern world, and established geodetic survey control to help build the great civil works of the United States. In working towards accomplishing these great works, the Coast Survey and Coast and Geodetic Survey were also responsible for helping develop much of the scientific infrastructure of the United States.
 

The charts, geodetic survey control network, and geophysical products were produced through the perseverance and ingenuity of an organization that expended millions of working-days since its first tentative efforts in the early 1800's towards building that network. Today there are over 1,100 nautical charts covering the coasts of the United States from Maine to Texas, California to the Beaufort Sea, the Hawaiian Islands, and all United States territories and protectorates. These charts have saved untold thousands of lives and helped move trillions of dollars in cargoes. Through time, they helped open up commerce to the Gulf Coast, West Coast, and Alaska. The geodetic network that originally began as a thin strip of triangulation along the coast now consists of over 1 million survey points throughout the United States that provide latitude, longitude, and elevation to high standards of precision and accuracy. The geophysical efforts of the Coast Survey that began with the first systematic efforts to determine magnetic declination and dip in the 1840's culminated more than a century later with the great marine magnetic surveys off the West Coast of the United States that were the first to observe the magnetic striping that provided the key to understanding seafloor spreading. The Coast Survey was the first to undertake systematic gravity surveys in the United States and NOAA still maintains a presence in gravity studies through geodetic applications and through satellite altimetry. In the realm of seismology, the Coast and Geodetic Survey in cooperation with the Carnegie Institution was one of the pioneering organizations in the study of geodynamics and also was the pioneering institution in the study of engineering seismology.
 

The Coast Survey was a major force in the formation and early work of the Smithsonian Institution, National Academy of Sciences, and the reorganization of the Lighthouse Service. The Office of Weights and Measures which evolved into the National Bureau of Standards and today's National Institute of Standards and Technology was an arm of the Coast Survey and Coast and Geodetic Survey until the early Twentieth Century. Coast Surveyors and their allies virtually ran the American Association for the Advancement of Science during its first decade of existence. In the early Twentieth Century, officers of the Coast and Geodetic Survey helped form the American Geophysical Union and the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
 

In spite of the role of the Coast Survey and Coast and Geodetic Survey in the history of the physical sciences, few are aware of its history, organization, or management. Fewer still are those who can name but a handful of individuals who were associated with the Survey or who have even an inkling of the way of life and accomplishments of those who devoted their lives to the Survey. This work, which is Volume I of a projected three volume history of the Coast Survey and Coast and Geodetic Survey, is an attempt to rectify that void in the history of our Nation and the history of science. This first volume concentrates on the period 1807-1867, the formative years of the Coast Survey and to a remarkable degree the formative years of American science.
 

Like many works of this nature, it reflects to some degree my personal biases, opinions, and professional experiences. I have attempted to minimize those effects by relying as much as possible on the words of those who were there living in the field, working on the survey ships, and fighting the political battles. Letters, diaries, broadsides, autobiographies, the annual reports of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Congressional debates and testimony, military records, scientific reports from other organizations, newspaper articles, and contemporary magazine articles were drawn upon as source material for this history. I can only hope that what comes through to the reader will be the voices of those who lived the experiences detailed in this work.
 
 

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