The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

  More drying, more maturing; polishing with fragments of charcoal and soapstone, chamois leather and clay-soaked silk—the surface now gleams and reflects, though with nothing resembling either glitter or gaudiness, but rather, a near-living texture of a gentle softness, ready only now for the application of the finest paints, or of gold dust, or silver lines, to be finished. It goes without saying that this last decorative process can take weeks or months, as the urushi artist makes his ink jar or bento box or kettle or tea bowl (tea bowl most especially) into a thing of perpetual elegance, due to represent his country’s artistic tradition for centuries to come.

  Patience and fine material, amalgamated with the enduring vision of the artist, who now slips into the background and quite deliberately pushes his art to the fore, are the essential elements in the making of the finest of Japanese craftsmanship. And to most cultured Japanese, it matters less whether that art is expressed by way of lacquer or porcelain, through intricately worked metal or delicately carved and jointed and polished wood, than whether it is performed with patience and care and tenderness and—dare one say it?—with reverence and love. The human participation—in no way a dominating participation, for in Japan, the artist seeks only to work in cooperation with his material, and to do so over accumulated amounts of time—is key. No machine will be employed, only well-worn hand tools that have been maintained and perfected for generations. The results define a nation and a people: to see a lacquer tea bowl is to see Japan in all her centuries of dedication to her craft.

  And all this craft, in a way, celebrates impermanence. Few other countries in the world make it so abundantly and officially clear that equal weight, respect, and admiration must be accorded both to the precise and to its opposite, to machine and to craft. That respect be accorded to titanium on the one hand and, on the other, to—yes, to such creations of the human mind and hand, to be sure—that most classically Japanese plant, found these days on the hillside of the recovering Minamisanriku and, at the time of this writing, on view as previously mentioned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: bamboo.

  Humankind more generally, obsessed and impressed today with the perceived worth of the finely finished edge and the perfectly spherical bearing and by degrees of flatness that are not known outside the world of the engineer, would perhaps do well similarly to learn to accept the equal significance, the equal weight, of the natural order. If not, then nature will in time overrun, and the green strands of jungle grass—and yes, the green strands of young bamboo—will eventually enfold and enwrap all the inventions that we make, no matter whether their tolerance is that of the thickness of an English shilling or a fraction of the diameter of a proton.

  Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.

  Afterword:

  The Measure of All Things

  Perfection is the child of time.

  —BISHOP JOSEPH HALL, WORKS (1625)

  Humankind has for most of its civilized existence been in the habit of measuring things. How far from this river to that hill? How tall is this man, that tree? How much milk shall I barter? What weight is that cow? How much length of cloth is required? How long has elapsed since the sun rose this morning? And what is the time right now? All life depends to some extent on measurement, and in the very earliest days of social organization a clear indication of advancement and sophistication was the degree to which systems of measurement had been established, codified, agreed to, and employed.

  The naming of units of measurement was of course one of the first orders of business in early civilization—the cubits of the Babylonians were probably the first units of length; there were the unciae of the Romans, the grain, the carat, the toise, the catty—and the yard and the half yard, the span, the finger, and the nail of early England.

  The later development of precision, however, demanded not so much a range of exotically named units, but trusted standards against which these lengths and weights and volumes and times and speeds, in whatever units they happened to be designated, could be measured.

  The development of standards is necessarily very much more modern than the creation of units—and over the years there has been a steady evolution of the debates about standards, which in summary can be divided into three—whether they are and should be based on tangible human-scale entities—the thumb or the knuckle for the inch, say; or on created objects—man-made rods of brass or cylinders of platinum, say; or whether they should be based on absolute aspects of the natural world, carefully observed aspects which are immutable and constant and eternal.

  IT WAS GALILEO who took the first step, in 1582, and by the simple act of noticing something quite mundane. It may or may not be legend: that while sitting in his pew in the cathedral at Pisa he watched the lantern over the nave swinging back and forth, and doing so at a regular rate. He experimented with a pendulum and found out that the rate of the swing depended not on the weight of the pendulum bob, but on the length of the pendulum itself. The longer the pendulum arm, the slower and more languid the back-and-forth interval. A short pendulum would result in a more rapid tick-tock, tick-tock. By way of Galileo’s simple observation so length and time were seen to be linked—a linkage that made it possible that a length could be derived not simply from the dimensions of limbs and knuckles and strides, but by the hitherto quite unanticipated observation of the passage of time.

  A century later an English divine, John Wilkins, proposed employing Galileo’s discovery to create an entirely new fundamental unit, one that had nothing to do with the then-traditional standard in England, which was a rod that was more or less officially declared to be the length of a yard. In a paper published in 1668, Wilkins proposed quite simply making a pendulum that had a beat of exactly one second—and then, whatever the length of the pendulum arm that resulted would be the new unit. He took his concept further: a unit of volume could be created from this length; and a unit of mass could be made by filling the resulting volume with distilled water. All three of these new proposed units, of length, volume, and mass, could then be divided or multiplied by ten—a proposal which made the Reverend Wilkins, at least nominally, the inventor of the idea of a metric system. Sad to say, the committee set up to investigate the plan of this remarkable figure* never reported, and his proposal faded into oblivion.

  Except that one aspect of the Wilkins proposal did resonate—albeit a century later—across the Channel in Paris, and with the support of the powerful cleric and diplomat Talleyrand. The formal proposal, which Talleyrand put to the National Assembly two years after the Revolution, in 1791, exactly duplicated Wilkins’s ideas, refining them only to the extent that the one-second beating pendulum be suspended at a known location along the latitude of 45 degrees North. (Varying gravitational fields cause pendulums to behave in varying ways: sticking to one latitude would help mitigate that problem.)

  But Talleyrand’s proposal fell afoul of the postrevolutionary zeal of the times. The Republican Calendar had been introduced by some of the ardent firebrands of the day, and for a while France was gripped by a mad confusion of new-named months (Fructidor, Pluviôse, and Vendémiaire among them), ten-day weeks (beginning on primidi and ending on décadi), and ten-hour days—with each hour being divided into one hundred minutes and each minute into a hundred seconds. Since Talleyrand’s proposed second did not match the Revolutionary Second (which was 13.6 percent shorter than a conventional second of the Ancien Régime) the National Assembly, gripped by the new orthodoxy, rejected the idea wholesale.

  And it would be more than two further centuries before the fundamental importance of the second was fully accepted. For now, in the minds of eighteenth-century French assemblymen, length was a concept vastly preferable to time.

  For in dismissing Talleyrand so they turned instead to another idea, brand-new, which was linked to a natural aspect of the Earth, and so in their view more suitably revolutionary. Either the meridian of the Earth or its equator should be
measured, they said, and divided into forty million equal parts, with each one of these parts being the new fundamental measure of length. After some vigorous debate, the parliamentarians opted for the meridian, in part because it passed through Paris; they then also decreed that to make the project manageable the meridian be measured not in its entirety, but only in the quarter of it that ran from the North Pole to the equator—a quarter of the way around, in other words. This quarter should then be divided into ten million parts—with the length of the fractional part then being named the meter (from the Greek noun μέτρον, a measure).

  A great survey was promptly commissioned by the French parliament to determine the exact length of the chosen meridian—or a tenth part of it, an arc subtending about nine degrees (a tenth of the ninety degrees of a quarter-meridian), and which, using today’s measurement, would be about a thousand kilometers long. It would necessarily be measured in the length units of eighteenth-century France: the toise (about six feet long), divided into six pieds du roi, each pied divided into twelve pouces, and these further divided into twelve lignes. But these units were of no consequence—because all that mattered was that the total length be known and then be divided by ten million—with whatever resulted becoming the measure that was now desired, a creation of France to be eventually gifted to the world.

  The proposed survey line ran from Dunkirk in the north to Barcelona in the south, each port city self-evidently at sea level. Since this nine-odd-degree arc was located around the middle of the meridian—Dunkirk is at 51 degrees North and Barcelona 41 degrees North, with the midpoint of 45 degrees North being the village of Saint-Médard-de-Guizières in the Gironde—it was thought likely the oblate nature of the Earth’s shape, the bulge that afflicts its sphericity and makes it resemble more of an orange than a football, would be most evident and so easier to counter with calculation. (To further confirm the Earth’s shape the French Academy of Sciences sent out two more expeditions, one to Peru and the other to Lapland, to see how long a degree of high latitude was: all confirmed the orange shape that Isaac Newton had predicted centuries before.)

  The story of the triangulation of the meridian in France and Spain, and which was carried out by Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre over six tumultuous years during the worst of the postrevolutionary terror, is the stuff of heroic adventure. On numerous occasions the pair escaped great violence (but not jail time) only by the skin of their teeth. The story is also outside the scope of this account, for what matters to precision engineers of the future—and to engineers all over the world, since that one remarkable survey led to the establishment of the metric system still in use today—is what the French did once the survey results were in. And that mostly involved the making of bronze or platinum rods.

  The survey results were announced in April 1799. The length of the meridian quadrant was calculated from the extrapolated survey findings to be 5,130,740 toise. All that was required was that bars and rods be cut or cast that were one ten-millionth of that number—0.5130740 toise, in other words. And that length would be, henceforward, the standard measure—the standard meter—of postrevolutionary France.

  The commissioners then ordered this length to be cast out of platinum, as what is known as an étalon—a standard. A former court goldsmith named Marc Étienne Janety had been selected to make it, and was called back from Marseille, where he had been sheltering from the excesses of the Terror. The result of his labors exists to this day—the Meter of the Archives, a bar of pure platinum that is twenty-five millimeters wide and four millimeters deep, and exactly, exactly, one meter in length. On June 22, 1799, this meter was officially presented to the National Assembly.

  But that was not all: for in addition to the platinum rod that was the meter, so also there came with it a few months later a pure platinum cylinder which, it was explained, was the étalon of mass, the kilogram. Janety had made this one too, and also from platinum, 39 millimeters tall, thirty-nine millimeters in diameter, stored in a neat octagonal box with the label proclaiming, in good Napoleonic calendric detail, “Kilogramme Conforme à la loi du 18 Germinal An 3, présenté le 4 Messidor An 7.”

  The two properties of length and mass were now inextricably and ineradicably connected. For once the standard of length had been determined, so that length could be employed to determine a volume and, using a standard material to fill that volume, so a mass could be determined too.* And so in Paris at the exhausting end of the eighteenth century it was decided to create a new standard for mass based on a formula of elegant simplicity. One-tenth of the newly presented meter—and which would be technically a decimeter—could be set as the side of an exactly manufactured cube. This cubic decimeter would be called a litre measure, and it would be made as precisely as possible out of steel or silver. It would then be filled entirely with pure distilled water and the water held as close as possible to the temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which the density of water is most stable. The resulting volume, this one liter of this particular water, would then be defined as having a mass of one kilogram.

  The platinum object made by the goldsmith M. Janety was duly cast, and adjusted until it exactly balanced the weight of that cubic decimeter of water. And that platinum object—very much smaller than the water, of course, since platinum was so much denser, by a factor of almost twenty-two—would from December 10, 1799, henceforward be the kilogram.

  The Kilogram of the Archives and the Meter of the Archives, from which the kilogram had been determined, were thus the new fundamentals of what would soon be a new world order of weights and measures. The metric system was now officially born.

  These two icons of its founding are still in existence, in a steel safe deep within the Archives Nationales de France in the Marais, in central Paris. One resides in an octagonal black leather-covered box, the other in a long and thin box of reddish-brown leather.

  Except that—and this is a constant feature in the universe of measurement—these beauteous objects were eventually found to be wanting.

  Years after they had been fashioned, the meridian line on which they had been based was resurveyed, and to widespread chagrin and dismay it was discovered that there were errors in Delambre and Méchain’s six-year eighteenth-century survey, and that their calculation of the length of the meridian was off. Not by much, but by enough for the physical Meter of the Archives to be shown to be two-tenths of a millimeter shorter than the newly calculated version. And it follows that if the meter was wrong, then the cubic meter and the cubic decimeter and the liter-of-water equivalent in platinum, which would be the kilogram, would be wrong also.

  So a cumbersome process was set in train to create a set of wholly new prototypes, which would be as perfect in their exactitude as late nineteenth-century science could manage. It took more than seven decades for the international community to agree, and many further years to make the requisite cache of bars and cylinders. The mechanics of their making illustrates just how far the idea of precision had come in the century since John Wilkinson, boring his cylinders for James Watt, had come. The need to make the standards as near-perfect as imaginable was to become the stuff of obsession.

  Fifty international delegates—all of them men, all of them white, and almost all of them with lengthy beards—gathered for the first meeting of the International Metre Commission in Paris in September 1872 to begin the process. They met in the former medieval priory of St. Martin des Champs, later to be turned into the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, one of the world’s greatest repositories of scientific instruments.*

  The countries that would decide the future of the world’s measurement system included all the then-great Western powers—Britain, the United States, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire—but pointedly, neither China nor Japan. Their sessions, and those of their associated conferences—most notably the Diplomatic Conference of the Metre, which was more concerned with national policies, less with the technical aspects of making pro
totypes—went on for what at this remove seems an interminable period.

  All of the meetings would, however, lead eventually to the signing, on May 20, 1875, of the Treaty of the Metre. It would mandate the formation of the BIPM, the present-day International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which would have as its home the Pavillon de Breteuil, outside Sèvres, and which it still inhabits today. Between them these bodies, at various times and in various ways, would commission the making of a set of vital new prototypes.

  It took nearly fifteen years for the defining set of internationally agreed standard measures to be created, for the new standard artifacts to be cast, machined, milled, measured, polished, and offered up for the world’s approval. On September 28, 1889, a ceremony was held in Paris to distribute them.

  The two best made, each so perfect in their appearance and exact in their dimensions, and which in consequence were nominated to be the international prototypes, had by now been chosen: they were the International Prototype Meter, to be known hereafter by the black-type letter M, and the International Prototype Kilogram—Le Grand K—designated by the black letter K. Both of these platinum-iridium alloy objects were to remain for all future time under heavy security in the basement of the Pavillon de Breteuil.

  All the others were then, and for this September day only, on display in the Pavillon’s observatory. The stubby little kilograms gleamed under glass cloches (the national standards under a pair of glass cloches, the IPK itself under three), the slender meter bars in wooden tubes that were further enclosed in brass tubes with special fixtures to keep them safe while they traveled.