There was a one-hundred-foot steel chain, having links each one foot long, with which to measure distances. With it went ten slender steel pins, each eighteen inches long, to the tops of which bits of red flannel were tied, so that they could be readily seen. The head chainman carried all of these to start with, and stuck one into the ground at the end of each hundred feet. The rear chainman gathered them up as he came to them, and thus, by counting the number of pins in his hand, he always knew just what distance had been measured.