Just to follow up on this and out of pure curiosity I made an ellipse in NX and simplified it, NX has a tool which can simplify splines into true lines and arcs to the closest approximation.
Anyway, NX simplified a 100mm x 50mm ellipse into 28 arcs.

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thanks guys, i would have to agree. the pictures are of the draftmen's method. however i tried a bunch of methods and nothing seemed to come close. in their examples they show good agreement. but with the ellipse i have, i don't get good agreement.

the example ellipse i'm working with has the following characteristics:

the height from center is 9.5313263 mm, the width from center is 3.5668193 mm, the foci from center is 8.8387771 mm, and the rho value of the conic section the ellipse started from is 0.4632322 mm.

at this point i'm assuming that if it was the 1950's and i wanted an ellipse with a certain height and width, it would be generated with a special mechanical drawing tool, as shown in previous links.