The Measure of All Things

by Ken Alder

  The most recent U.S. campaign to adopt the meter began in the 1970s, when it became clear that the United States would be the last major metric holdout. In 1971 the National Bureau of Standards issued a report entitled A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come without even the courtesy of a question mark. Efficiency gains and international trade, it argued, made metric conversion well worth the short-term costs to consumers, manufacturers, and government agencies. Multinational corporations wanted to assemble goods from parts made in all corners of the globe. Certain industries—alcohol and automobiles—had already adopted the metric system. But when the 1975 Metric Conversion Act emerged from Congress it lacked enforcement powers, financial wherewithal, or a timetable for conversion. As President Gerald Ford memorably announced at the signing ceremony: when it comes to the metric system, U.S. industry “is miles ahead of official policy.”

  MARCEL DUCHAMP, “TROIS STOPPAGES ETALON”

  Late in life the Franco-American artist Marcel Duchamp referred to this piece, usually translated as “Three Standard Stoppages,” as “a joke about the meter.” It was also his investigation into the relationship between universal standards and individual creativity, as well as a seminal moment in the inauguration of art made from found objects. The piece was begun in 1913-14, when Duchamp “dropped” a piece of thread one meter long from a height of one meter onto a wooden slat and preserved the resulting curvy shape by painting the string over with varnish. For each of the three repetitions of this “experiment” he then cut a wooden template to match the curvy shape. These he later placed one above the other, eventually adding vertical and horizontal straightedge rulers labeled “1 METRE” to document his procedure. The assembled piece was not completed until 1953, when it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the intervening decades Duchamp deployed the curvy wooden templates as his own personal standard to design a series of other artworks. According to the artist, this was his first attempt to use “chance as a medium”; yet closer examination shows that he did not drop the threads at all, but in fact carefully arranged them on the wooden slats. There are many ways to read this fascinating piece. It subverts the ideal of exact measurement even as it demonstrates the role of universal standards in the creation of the most personal and idiosyncratic art. It may suggest the “stoppage” of the guillotine. (From the Museum of Modern Art, New York; © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp; photograph by Art Resource)

  And so it has remained. Official attempts to convert freeway signs to kilometers have only riled the citizenry. Newspaper editorials mock metric advocates as petty dictators, or worse, boring. Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene founded WAM! (We Ain’t Metric!): “WAM’s guidelines are eloquent and simple: We are against the metric system because we don’t like it. We won’t learn it because we don’t want to.” President Reagan disbanded the Metric Board. A 1992 follow-up pamphlet from the National Bureau of Standards, A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come—For Real, had the ring of desperation. Gallup polls showed that, as awareness of the metric system doubled between 1971 and 1991 (from 38 to 80 percent), the number of those who wanted the U.S. to adopt the system dropped by half (from 50 to 26 percent). It was a trend that would have made Condorcet weep.

  The kilometer signs have come down and gas is again being pumped in gallons, now that the service stations have added a digit to the left of the decimal point to keep track of the dollars. But America keeps rolling silently toward the metric system. Its car parts are sized in metric units. So are its bicycles. It is no longer enough for American exporters simply to label their products in both American and metric units (soft metric); trade groups abroad are demanding that goods be delivered in even metric units (hard metric).

  Oddly, as more Americans are lured into using the metric system, it may be that the nation will lose the very uniformity of weights and measures that has long made the metric system seem unnecessary in the United States. The most spectacular fatality of this new mixture was the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. Has the time come for America to join the metric globe at last?

  No doubt the world economy would operate with greater efficiency if we all spoke the same language; yet the world would be impoverished by the loss of the diversity this represents. Foreigners often complain—and the French complain vociferously—that America is currently spearheading a capitalist globalization that is leveling all the differences that make life worth living. Well, in this instance it is America that is different. This book has demonstrated that measures are social conventions, the outcome of a political process. Many Americans already use the metric system in domains where the economy operates on a global scale, as do many (but not all) engineers, physicians, scientists, and other technical professionals. These people are already metrically “bilingual,” which is, in its own way, a good thing. But Americans have shown little willingness to give up their traditional measures in their daily lives. Sooner or later it will seem time for Americans to give up their old units, not because the rest of the world uses the metric system, but because America does.

  EPILOGUE

  The Shape of Our World

  “You’re such a fool! Of course I don’t need to see you, if that’s what you mean. You’re not exactly a sight for sore eyes, you know. I need you to exist and not change. You’re like that platinum meter bar they keep in Paris or thereabouts. I can’t imagine that anyone ever actually wants to see it.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  “Well I don’t want to see it, not me. I’m just glad to know it exists, that it measures exactly one ten-millionth of the quarter meridian. I think about it every time they measure a room or sell me cloth by the meter.”

  “Really?” I answer coldly.

  “You know, I could remember you as a merely abstract virtue instead, a sort of limit. You ought to be thankful that I remember your face each time we meet. . . .”

  Anny suddenly smiles at me so tenderly that tears fill my eyes.

  “I’ve thought about you more often than that platinum meter bar. Not a day goes by that I haven’t thought of you. And I remembered exactly what you looked like, right down to the last detail.”

  —JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Nausea

  The baseline of Melun, which Delambre measured in the early spring of 1798, is now known as the N6, a stretch of the national highway that runs northeast out of Melun toward Paris some thirty miles away. In 1882 a party of French geodesers returned to Melun. They checked the masonry pyramids that Delambre had erected at each terminus and rebuilt them as a memorial to his labor. But they did not remeasure his baseline, for fear, it would seem, of impugning the accuracy of the original Archive Meter. Instead, they calculated the length of the baseline indirectly, by triangulation, and found it to be within one centimeter of Delambre’s value. A discrepancy of one centimeter over the course of ten kilometers (six miles) amounts to an error of 0.0001 percent. Whatever progress scientists have made since the eighteenth century, it is still worth pausing to marvel at the level of precision achieved by Delambre and Méchain. And to appreciate what they taught us—both by their efforts and by inadvertence—about error.

  It is often said that modern science has “disenchanted” nature, stripping it of demons and divinities, making it mechanistic, devoid of moral lessons and, above all, amenable to explanation. But having disenchanted nature—rendering it fully comprehensible and empty of meaning—science itself could hardly avoid disenchantment as well. In pushing measurement toward the final approach to precision, the savants discovered that error was inevitable, and that dealing with it would mean turning against themselves the same apparatus of disinterested analysis that they had long deployed against nature. In the process, a calling hedged with personal virtue became a career, and a new ethic of error management came to guarantee the accuracy of results. Of course human beings—both lay folk and professionals—will always read moral lessons into nature. And c
haracter still counts in science: a scientist’s reputation remains his or her most prized possession. But colleagues now assess one another’s results with dispassionate tools. Error has become a problem that is addressed by a social process.

  Today, the memorials at Melun are gone, destroyed in a road accident. The French countryside has been transformed by the world that the metric system helped make possible. The N6 still runs as straight and true as the king’s engineers could make it, a headlong journey through French history. Once it leaves the medieval center of Melun, the N6—named rue General Patton—passes a nineteenth-century brick Catholic school and charity hospital before it runs parallel to a strip mall of shabby bistros and gasoline stations. It then crosses the Cercle d’Europe, a grassy rotary decorated with the flags of the European Community’s member nations, where, on the morning I cycled out of town, a caravan from the Circus Zavetta was encamped, with three Indian elephants grazing on the verge. Beyond the rotary, the highway traverses a stretch of early-third-millennium consumer paradise: a sleek BMW dealership, a gigantic Conforama hypermarché (the French equivalent of Wal-Mart), followed by a series of megastores selling furniture, bathroom tiles, and the like. The scene can be found on the outskirts of a hundred French provincial towns. The Paris media complain about “globalization,” and the tourists marvel at the vegetable stalls on market days, but the French are Europe’s most avid superstore shoppers.

  Then the scene changes. Beyond the megastores lie rolling fields of rape, yellow in the sunshine. Soon the fields lick at the roadside, shaded by twin rows of plane trees, quite possibly the same six hundred trees Delambre trimmed to get a clear line of sight down the highway. In the middle of an empty field stands an old inn, “A l’Attaque du Courrier de Lyon,” named after a notorious postal-express robbery which took place nearby in 1796, two years before Delambre conducted his measurements.

  Then the scene changes again and the N6 swerves briefly (its only deviation) to pass over the A5 expressway and skirt the main Paris–Lyon TGV high-speed train line. An industrial park, located at this triple junction, ships liquid air and other high-tech products to markets around the world. Once it arrives on the other side of the expressway, the N6 reverts to cobblestones and the highway narrows to pass through the ancient village of Lieusaint, where Delambre’s baseline came to a halt. The town is a remote suburb of Paris, an hour’s commute by rail. The village center consists of a small church, a pizza parlor, and an Arab grocery. Many who live there today are North African immigrants. Some kids were kicking a soccer ball in a field behind a brick wall when I passed through. They asked me about my bike; they told me about life in Lieusaint (which translates as “holy place”). It’s miserable here, they said with a smile.

  France has changed in two hundred years. French products go out into the world, and the world has come to France. The world is wrapped in a single metrical language, yet France is still divided by languages and cultures—as is the world.

  The creators of the metric system believed that human beings were shaped, first and foremost, by their experience of the world. They wanted citizens to be able to assess their own best economic interest, without which they could never be free. Give people the tools to treat the material world in a rational and consistent manner, they believed, and in time the people themselves would become rational and consistent. They wanted the metric system to create a new kind of citizen, much as we expect the Internet to teach new political virtues to the citizens of the Information Age. Their goal was to make productivity the visible measure of economic progress, and price the paramount variable in exchange. In many ways, their vision has triumphed. The euro, the common currency of much of Europe as of 2002, is a direct heir of the metric system. Nowadays it seems as if price has at last become the measure of all things.

  But even the global markets that set prices are social creations governed by human institutions and human desires. And as the labors of Delambre and Méchain amply attest, even our modern impersonal measures are the product of human ingenuity, human passion, and the choices of particular people in particular times and places. So in the end, there is no escaping Protagoras’ 2,500-year-old motto: “Man is the measure of all things.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The literary convention that the author’s spouse is the last to be thanked is surely meant to imply “last but not least.” So in a book that makes much of priority, let me state for the record that I owe thanks “first and most” to Bronwyn Rae. My daughter, Madeleine, is my other star of incalculable worth—although her full height cannot yet be taken. I thank my parents for first introducing me to matters scientific and French, though they cannot be held entirely responsible for the resulting concatenation. My sister, a scientist of integrity, and my brother, a reasoning moralist, have taught me that such concatenations are still possible, and that the age of the savant is not quite past.

  I would also like to thank my editor, Bruce Nichols, for the care and attention he has devoted to this book, as well as the assistance of the rest of the staff at The Free Press in New York. I greatly appreciate the optimistic and energetic guidance of Christy Fletcher and her colleagues at Carlisle and Co. For help with photography, I would like to thank Roman Stansberry, Gilbert Coudon, Jim Lane, and Aron Vinegar. For the fine original maps of France and the Balearic Islands, thanks are due to Chris Robinson. For help in gathering research materials, I would like to thank Dario Gaggio, Sander Gliboff, Arne Hessenbruch, Stanislav Rosenberg, and Dana Simmons.

  Colleagues and friends at Northwestern University and in the invisible college of scholars have taught me that the writing of history, like the making of science, is a social activity. The manuscript has benefited enormously from critical readings by Guy Boistel, Peter Gaffney, John Heilbron, Susan Herbst, Sarah Maza, Joel Mokyr, Ted Porter, Jessica Riskin, Dana Simmons, Mary Terrall, and Mike Tobin. Finally, in a book about error—and its transformation from a moral failing into a social problem—let me hasten to add that any remaining mistakes are my own and I take personal responsibility for them.

  ALSO BY KEN ALDER

  Engineering the Revolution

  The White Bus: A Novel

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Free Press eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Free Press and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  NOTE ON MEASURES

  All measures in this book are given in the Anglo-American units, unless otherwise specified. I provide below some rough equivalents in Ancien Régime units. Needless to say, they should not be construed as exact equalities since Ancien Régime measures with the same name varied by as much as 50 percent within France. The best modern table of correspondences is Ronald Zupko, French Weights and Measures Before the Revolution: A Dictionary of Provincial and Local Units (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). Zupko’s 224-page dictionary is necessarily incomplete and should be supplemented by the hundred or so tables of correspondences drawn up by the various French départements between 1793 and 1812. These tables are likewise incomplete. An entire subfield of history—historical metrology—is devoted to extracting old measures from archeological and documentary evidence. At times, this evidence about the measures of the past is then mined to reconstruct the daily lives of the people of the past.

  Linear measures:

  toise ≈ fathom ≈ 6 feet

  aune ≈ ell ≈ 3 feet

  pied ≈ foot

  pouce ≈ inch

  ligne ≈ 1/12 of an inch

  Other measures:

  livre ≈ pound

  boisseau ≈ bushel

  pinte ≈ quart

  Degrees:

  During the years 1793–98 a circle of 360 degrees was occasionally defined as having 400 degrees. All angle measurements in the text, as well as all latitudes
and longitudes, are given in the 360-degree system. Note that in this standard system each degree (symbol: °) is divided into 60 minutes (symbol: ') and each minute is divided into 60 seconds (symbol: "). Thus a latitude of 36°44'61.26'’ should be read as lying 36 degrees, 44 minutes, and 61.26 seconds north of the equator. (All latitudes in this book are north of the equator.)

  Dates:

  The text gives the Gregorian calendar date for events rather than the Revolutionary calendar date, although both are given in the endnotes where appropriate. Years in the Revolutionary calendar are given in Roman numerals.

  Money:

  The Ancien Régime unit of currency was the livre (pound), divided into 12 sous (shillings) each worth 20 deniers (pence). The Republican government resurrected the old name franc (to be divided decimally into 100 centimes), and after some discussion settled on a valuation making one franc nearly equal to one livre. In fact, the decimal franc was initially worth one-eightieth more than the old livre, so that it would come out to a round weight of 4.5 grams of silver instead of the old lower tolerance of 4.419 grams of silver. In the Revolutionary period, however, the names franc and livre were used with some degree of interchangeability as the legislation evolved. With the Napoleonic banking reform of 1803 the franc became the fixed currency and its silver content was raised to 5 grams. Assignats were a paper money created early in the Revolution with a face value of 1 franc; however, they soon lost value and the government began to publish tables of discounted values for an inflation rate which totaled 20,000 percent over the course of four years. The mandat was another paper currency temporarily introduced to replace the assignat. The best discussion of finance and the economy during the Revolution is François Crouzet, La grande inflation: La monnaie en France de Louis XVI à Napoléon (Paris: Fayard, 1993).