November 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 75Days after
discovering
the cache in
Saalfeld, Hough
wrote this urgent
note request-
ing additional
troops to secure
the town and
the captured
materials.Hough and his
team set up a
military govern-
ment in Saalfeld,
thus securing
tons of strategic
materials.cutting-edge technology used to create topographic
maps from aerial photos. Bristling with knobs and
adjustable arms, each machine was big enough to fi ll
a room and required two people to operate. A com-
plex interior system of lenses and fi lters combined
images from overlapping aerial photos to make
high-precision measurements of elevation diff erenc-
es between hills and valleys and other features of the
terrain. The models captured in Saalfeld were made
by Zeiss, the renowned German optics fi rm; Hough
estimated their combined value at $500,000 (nearly
$7 million today). He ordered a furniture factory in
Saalfeld to build shipping crates, and sent one of his
offi cers to fetch an engineer from Zeiss headquarters
to oversee the disassembly and safe packing of the
precious optical equipment.
One Sunday in late May, with most of the material
from Saalfeld safely relocated to the American zone,
Hough fi nally gave his men a day off. It was their
fi rst since March. After the intense rush of the past
few weeks, Hough, too, must have needed a chance
to rest. In his memos, he noted that they’d had a
stretch of pleasant spring weather, and the country-
side of southern Germany looked beautiful. German
soldiers could be seen on the streets, shuffl ing their
way home, still wearing their uniforms and carrying
their packs.THE END OF THE WAR did not slow Hough down. He
already had a vision for what to do with the captured
material, and in Bamberg he quickly got to work. Geo-
desists had recently begun to aspire to an ambitious
new goal: creating a geodetic network, or “datum,”
covering the entire world. In 1945, this was still a dis-
tant dream. Europe alone was a patchwork of roughly
20 datums. Each country, sometimes even individual
regions within a single country, had performed its own
surveys, often using diff erent mathematical methods.THE REST OF HOUGHTEAM KEPT AT IT. SHALLENBERGER AND ESPENSHADE UNCOVERED
MAPS AND DATA HIDDEN INSIDE SALT MINES AND CASTLES AND EVEN BURIED AMID
HUMAN BONES IN THE GRAVEYARD OF A MONASTERY.