The founder
Brandon Selfors spent over a decade running a digital agency — finance, insurance, gaming, adtech — and then became a licensed trainee appraiser in Tampa after meeting the appraiser who valued his own family’s home.
He learned the trade from the inside, which means he learned the paperwork from the inside: the hour logs, the monotony, the fees that insulted the work. With a wife and six children, the traditional path to certification was not feasible. So he stayed a trainee, kept doing the field work he liked, and built the door he could not find.
An insider by trade and an outsider to the software business. That combination, not either half of it, is why this exists. He is still a trainee, deliberately — it keeps the question of who the software is for from ever becoming abstract.
The name
The software is named for Edmund Gunter, who made the instrument that measured America and never once said what the land was worth. That division is the whole point: the toolmaker’s job is to make the tools trustworthy, and the judgement stays with the person holding the chain.
The professor
Gunter was Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London from 1619 until his death. He was a clergyman as well as a mathematician, which was ordinary for the century — and so was the fact that nobody had yet drawn a firm line between astronomy and astrology. He worked on both sides of a distinction that had not finished being invented.
He was, by every account, more interested in instruments than in theory. He wanted the answer without the working.
The chain
He made a surveyor’s chain: sixty-six feet long, divided into a hundred links of 7.92 inches each. The dimensions look arbitrary and are the opposite of arbitrary. They were chosen so the arithmetic would come out.
- Ten square chains make an acre. Exactly. No remainder, no table to look up.
- Eighty chains make a mile. Also exactly.
- A hundred links to the chain put land measurement on a decimal footing two centuries before the metric system argued for one.
Before it, a survey was an argument. After it, a survey was a number two people could check independently and agree on. That is the whole invention.
How it got to America
The Public Land Survey System — the grid of townships and sections that most of the United States west of the Ohio is divided into — was laid out in chains. The lines a modern appraiser reads in a legal description trace back to a length of linked iron a London professor specified so he would not have to multiply.
The rest of it
The chain is the famous one. It was not the only one.
- Gunter’s scale — a two-foot boxwood rule engraved with logarithmic scales, worked with a pair of dividers to multiply and divide. It is the direct ancestor of the slide rule, which is to say of every calculating instrument that followed it.
- Gunter’s quadrant — a quarter-circle for reading the sun’s altitude, the time of day and your latitude off one instrument.
- The words themselves. Gunter introduced cosine and cotangent. Anyone who has done trigonometry has used his vocabulary.
- A moving compass. Comparing his own readings against an earlier survey’s, he found that magnetic north had shifted — the first observation that declination changes over time, which had been assumed fixed.
Why the software carries his name
Gunter did not tell a surveyor what a piece of land was worth. He gave them an instrument, and the instrument made their measurement something a stranger could verify without taking their word for it. The judgement stayed with the person holding the chain.
That is the arrangement this platform keeps. That judgement is yours, and so is the name at the bottom of it.