AbstractIn the early days of settlement in South Australia, Torrens proposed the now widely accepted Torrens Title System for control and registration of land ownership. The system called for fixed land boundaries which entailed traversing these boundaries with, at first a circumferentor and chain, and in later years a theodolite and chain. From the outset it was evident that a Gunter's chain was not suitable for the very long lines encountered, because it was too short and too easily caught by sticks and bushes along the boundaries roughly axed through the Australian Inland. Thus the minds of Australian surveyors of the last century turned towards finding a suitable replacement for their Gunter's chains and in due course the steel tapes now used for most cadastral and many engineering surveys in Australia and New Zealand came into being.