Rod (unit)
The rod, perch, or pole (sometimes also lug) is a surveyor's tool[1] and unit of length of various historical definitions.
In British imperial and US customary units, it is defined as 16+1⁄2 feet, equal to exactly 1⁄320 of a mile, or 5+1⁄2 yards (a quarter of a surveyor's chain), and is exactly 5.0292 meters.
The rod is useful as a unit of length because integer multiples of it can form one acre of square measure (area).
Henry wanted to raise even more funds for his wars than he'd seized directly from church property (he'd also assumed the debts of the monasteries[1]), and as James Burke writes and quotes in the book Connections that the English monk Richard Benese "produced a book on how to survey land using the simple tools of the time, a rod with cord carrying knots at certain intervals, waxed and resined against wet weather."
A chain is a larger unit of length measuring 66 feet (20.1168 m), or 22 yards, or 100 links,[11] or 4 rods (20.1168 meters).
An acre is defined as the area of 10 square chains (that is, an area of one chain by one furlong), and derives from the shapes of new-tech plows[2] and the desire to quickly survey seized church lands into a quantity of squares for quick sales[3] by Henry VIII's agents; buyers simply wanted to know what they were buying whereas Henry was raising cash for wars against Scotland and France.
By the time of the industrial revolution and the quickening of land sales, canal and railway surveys, et al. Surveyor rods such as used by George Washington were generally made of dimensionally stable metal—semi-flexible drawn wrought iron linkable bar stock (not steel), such that the four folded elements of a chain were easily transportable through brush and branches when carried by a single man of a surveyor's crew.
The related unit of square measure was the scrupulum or decempeda quadrata, equivalent to about 8.76 m2 (94.3 sq ft).
The rod was still in use as a common unit of measurement in the mid-19th century, when Henry David Thoreau used it frequently when describing distances in his work, Walden.
In Vermont, the default right-of-way width of state and town highways and trails is three rods 49 ft 6 in (15.09 m).
The perch is also in extensive use in Sri Lanka, being favored even over the rood and acre in real estate listings there.
[31] Perches were informally used as a measure in Queensland real estate until the early 21st century, mostly for historical gazetted properties in older suburbs.
