INAUGURAL PLENARY SESSION 
on Tuesday, 6th September, 1960 
The Secretary-General: As the Secretary-General of the International Society 
for Photogrammetry, I have pleasure in calling to order this first General Assembly of 
the Ninth Annual Congress for Photogrammetry. Pray silence for your President, 
General Brown. 
The President: We are honoured to have with us this morning a distinguished 
Member of Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, the Rt Hon Earl Wal- 
degrave, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Food. He has very 
kindly come here to open our proceedings, and I will now ask him to speak. 
The Rt Hon Earl Waldegrave: I am very pleased and honoured to have been 
asked to perform the opening ceremony of this, the Ninth Congress of the International 
Society for Photogrammetry. It is, I believe, the first time that the Congress of this 
Society has been held in Great Britain since the Society was formed in 1910. The Con 
gress, as you know, is being held in this country at the invitation of The Royal Institution 
of Chartered Surveyors and The British Photogrammetric Society, and has been 
organised by a Congress Board working in close collaboration with the President and 
the Secretary-General of the International Society for Photogrammetry. 
I hope I may speak on behalf of all these Societies as well as on behalf of Her 
Majesty’s Government in extending the warmest welcome to all the official Delegates 
and visitors from many countries to this Congress. 
Speaking as a layman, a politician, a Jack of all trades, I must confess that until 
1 was asked to open this Congress I knew very little about the process of photogram 
metry, but even a layman can see surely that this process has an infinite number of 
possible applications. I was vastly interested to learn of the increasing part that photo 
grammetry is playing in the lives of us all. 
The first and, 1 suppose, still the most important application of photogrammetry 
is the taking of measurements from photographs - this, as 1 understand, is the correct 
definition - and is an aid to surveying and map-making. In a rapidly-developing world 
the need for accurate and up-to-date maps surely needs no stressing. For centuries, 
of course, the classical methods of surveying depended on taking measurements, both 
linear and angular, on the ground, and these methods must necessarily be slow and 
deliberate, particularly, perhaps, when you are mapping deserts or jungles where the 
physical difficulties, including transport and communications, need no stressing. 
However, it is worth remembering that even at the present time, in this year of 1960, 
only sixteen per cent of the world’s surface is mapped at a scale of 1/50,000. That is a 
scale which, I believe, is generally regarded as quite an essential minimum or maximum, 
whichever you call it, for the most elementary planning service. 
However, the introduction of photogrammetry as a tool of the surveyor has 
enormously increased the speed with which surveys at almost all scales can be com 
pleted. At a time when the world is becoming more and more conscious of its respon 
sibility towards those under-developed areas, where the standard of living is in some 
cases little above starvation level, the importance of photogrammetry as an aid to the 
development of such areas cannot be exaggerated. 
Photogrammetry is, however, also playing an increasing part in many other 
fields: in the conservation of forests; in geology, where it provides the topographical 
base, the maps required by the geologist, and by the forester and soil surveyor for 
recording their field observations. Furthermore, engineering projects of almost every