IV STEP: SCIENCE

The science behind the archipendulum

Although the archipendulum is a fundamental tool in the construction field, it has been replaced by the more practical Arabic level. Nevertheless, it is possible to find another field which makes use of the archipendulum, that is to say the topography.

The word comes from the Greek and literally it means "description of the place through drawing"; it representes all the tools and procedures which allow to study a limited portion of land without considering the complication represented by the curvature of the earth. 

The most practical objective of this science is to provide the so-called "topographic survey" of the interested area: it is easy to understand how it has been the archipendulum itself to affect the birth of this subject. In fact, also the ancients Egyptians, who can be considered the true developers of these studies, used the archipendulum in order to draw the borders between properties, to mesure the extension of  fields and for the construction of pyramides and temples. 

Historically, the topography representes the basis of all these techniques which nowaydays belongs to the terrestrial and  naval cartography ; for this reason, even if the word comes from the Greek, it has been invented recently: in fact, it has been coined in the XVIII century.

Fonte delle informazioni e dell'immagine: Renato Cannarozzo Lanfranco Cucchiarini William Meschieri: "Misure, rilievo, progetto". https://online.scuola.zanichelli.it/cannarozzomisure-files/Volume_1/Approfondimenti/Zanichelli_Cannarozzo_Vol1_UnitaB1_07.pdf

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